Left-Wing Pornography and Ideology Critique: Part Two, An Aesthetics of Spectatorship or a Politics of Production?

This is a long essay divided into six parts, the next three of which we'll post over the next week or two. Part one is entitled "Pornography and Obscenity", Part three, "Left-Wing Pornography in Late Capitalism: Autonomy, Liberation and Authenticity", Part Four, "Pornographic Idealism: The Cock made Mind", Part Five, "Sensation: The Pornographic Hell, Pornography and the Avant-Garde/ Pornography and the Entertainment Industry"  and Part Six "Can anything be done?".

Notes and Warnings:

1. Some fairly unpleasant things are described in these posts, especially at the end of this part. We thought about leaving them out but, on balance felt including the descriptions and quotes was necessary.

2. This essay doesn't claim to be exhaustive, there are a number of important areas that have been excluded or treated in less detail than they deserve, these include racism in pornography, violence in gay pornography and the movement between material and immaterial labour and the economics of "free" pornography within post-Fordism.

3. In the Marx and Adorno quotes, we've let "men", "mankind" and "his" pass without comment. It should be obvious that, in most cases, what Marx and Adorno argue about men applies even more strongly to women. Further, as Hobsbawm writes of Marx's "men make their own history...", "the German word means men and women." 

Left-Wing Pornography and Ideology Critique: Part Two, An Aesthetics of Spectatorship or A Politics of Production?

The law on “extreme” pornography defines a pornographic image as of “a nature that it must reasonably be assumed to have been produced solely or principally for the purpose of sexual arousal”.

In a true identity of opposites, the law on extreme pornography and its opponents on the left, by discounting the pornography as produced and pornography as a political practice collapse pornography and obscenity. It is only by collapsing pornography and obscenity that the images Walsh possessed could be described as pornographic. For both sides, pornography becomes a merely moral or aesthetic question, for social conservatives obscenity is sufficient to demand possession of the images be prosecuted. Liberals, accepting the conservative collapsing of obscenity and pornography, failing to see it as produced and political, can only treat all critiques of pornography as oppressive invasions of the privacy of adults and their right to make autonomous moral and aesthetic decisions. It is only on this basis that the triteness of framing the problem of pornography as one of spectators being offended by the images and the solution “is not to possess them.”

The liberals are correct to argue that the law on “extreme” pornography is problematic, but it is not problematic for the reasons they stress. The law is underpinned- and here there are certain affinities with the sporadically useful but unsatisfactory debates over the sexualisation of children- by a wide range of positions, some of which are profoundly regressive, some of which are not. Firstly, the law (and in many ways its use to prosecute Walsh) responds to right-wing moralizing, as with the liberals who they claim to oppose, the problem of pornography is elided with the question of obscenity. However, right-wing moralizing does not exhaust the law even less than it exhausts the possible objections to pornography. The law is also underpinned by more general worries about the harmful effects on both the individuals who use pornography and society as a whole of pornography. The trigger for the law was the murder of Jane Longhurst by a habitual user of necrophiliac and especially violent (it’s important to note, following MacKinnon and Dworkin’s definitions that all pornography is violence) pornography. Finally, the law responds, confusedly and limitedly, to feminist concerns both about the effects of the consumption of pornography and the violence inherent in the production of the pornography covered by the law (and, indeed, feminist concerns about the production of all pornography). 

The Bashful Camorra of Consumers

Walter Benjamin writes of Proust the perceptive but vicious social critic and detective, “the upper ten thousand were to him a clan of criminals, a clan of conspirators beyond compare: the Camorra of consumers. It excludes from its world everything that has a part in production, or at least demands that this part be gracefully and bashfully concealed behind the kind of manner that is sported by the polished professionals of production…And because the remotest as well as the most primitive memory of nature’s productive forces was to be banished from this satanic magic world, Proust found a perverted relationship more serviceable than a normal one.” (“The Image of Proust”, p. 205) Since Proust this Camorra of consumers, excluding all traces of production, have extended themselves, albeit often in a less polished way, throughout capitalism. The dialectical tensions resulting from the exclusion of everything that has a part of production, including nature’s productive forces, is essential to understanding both the liberal defence of pornography and the content of left-wing pornography. In this way, the violent, sexual brutality of pornography should be understood as a kind of bashfulness.

The, not disinterested, confusion of obscenity with pornography requires that this world of production, conceived in the broadest possible way (and, therefore, including reproduction), is gracefully ignored. It is precisely this banishing that allows pornography to be presented as speech and, therefore, requiring that it be protected from the action of the state. In the US, by appeals to the constitution, what MacKinnon describes as “First Amendment absolutism”, this is how pornography has become protected. (p. 208) Against this absolutism MacKinnon argues, the Constitution (and more generally arguments over the protection of speech) cannot be abstracted from its history, “white men…wrote [the constitution] to guarantee to their freedom to keep something they felt at risk of losing”, society in general and, in particular, what is defined as outside or not governed by the law. (p. 207) Despite the absence of the First Amendment in the UK, arguments in defence of pornography are grounded in the same shrunken and abstracted understanding. Pornography is defined as an issue of speech or of privacy by ignoring how the very construction of the law and the liberal state creates privacy by defining a realm with which the state (or politics more generally- liberalism, wrongly, identifies politics with the state- cannot interfere). Against this, MacKinnon notes how arguments around free speech, inevitably, ignores those whose “speech is silenced prior to the law, prior to any operation of the state’s prohibition” (p. 207). MacKinnon’s argument is extended to show precisely the law’s structure and exclusions which underpin silencing prior to the law, “from the feminist standpoint because women are oppressed socially, prior to law, without state acts, often in intimate contexts. For women this means that those domains in which women are distinctively subordinated are assumed by the Constitution to be the domain of freedom” (p. 207) For pornography’s defenders (and indeed those who criticize it arguing that there are limits to speech) the domain in which pornography is produced and the domain where most of its most harmful consequences occur is banished from the concern of law or politics.

"Every Time Someone watches that Film they are watching me being raped"

The law bans “extreme” pornography, which, in addition, to being pornographic, “grossly offensive, disgusting or otherwise of an obscene character” and also depict an act which falls into one of four categories: (a) an act which threatens a person's life, (b) an act which results, or is likely to result, in serious injury to a person's anus, breasts or genitals, (c) an act which involves sexual interference with a human corpse, or (d) a person performing an act of intercourse or oral sex with an animal (whether dead or alive). 

What the liberal defence of pornography, focusing on the dubious aspect of the law, “grossly offensive, disgusting, or otherwise of an obscene character”, or generalizing from the singular case of Simon Walsh, ignores, quite deliberately, is what is required to produce images or video including an act “which threatens a person’s life” or “which results, or is likely to result, in serious injury to a person’s anus, breasts or genitals.” It should not be necessary, but it is, to stress, as MacKinnon does, “in visual media…it takes a real person doing each act to make what you see” (p. 180), or Dworkin, “real women are tied up, stretched, hanged, fucked, gang-banged, whipped, beaten, begging for more. In the photographs and films real women are used as porneia…To profit, the pimps must supply the porneia as the technology widens the market for the visual consumption of women being brutalized and loving it.” (p. 201-2), or Linda Marchiano, on Deep Throat, “virtually every time someone watches that film they are watching me being raped.” (p. 182) These rapes, these stretchings, these hangings, whippings… are precisely what liberal and left-wing defenders of pornography, bashfully, efface.

This then is the identity of the right-wing, anti-obscenity moralizers or the, equally moralistic, pro-obscenity moralizers of the left, by collapsing the distinction between pornography and obscenity, the violence essential to the production of pornography disappears. Everything is framed from the perspective of a gender-neutral spectator or consumer viewing gender-neutral images, it is this ideal liberal subject, the law emphasises the judgements made by "any reasonable person", whose desires are policed. The ethics and aesthetics of spectatorship and, consequently, framing things as a debate over censorship traps the left in a useless confrontation over the right to differing sexual tastes. The ethics or aesthetics of spectatorship, whether conservative or liberal, need to be replaced with a politics of production which, in contrast to Walsh’s perhaps obscene images, treats pornographic images as commodities that is as “products of labour” whose production is often extremely violent.

A Politics of Production

The shift to a politics, of production (politics, as MacKinnon puts it being a question of power and powerlessness,) is required to break this deadlock. Firstly, it displaces defences of the user of pornography through privacy by introducing the privacy of women in pornography (and the uses made of the possibility to exposure of secrets to intimidate women into continuing in pornography). The ease of reproduction of images and videos over the Internet has intensified this process. In How to Make Love like a Pornstar, Jenna Jameson writes (and we’re dealing here with a book described as a “major recruitment tool for the industry” not works by Dworkin, MacKinnon or Dines or Marchiano’s Ordeal, which for some bleak reason Google books describes as fiction, also the porny cover and attribution to "Linda Lovelace" is stunningly off), “most girls get their first experience in gonzo films—in which they’re taken to a crappy studio apartment in Mission Hills andpenetrated in every hole possible by some abusive asshole who thinks her name is Bitch.  And these girls . . . go home afterward and pledge never to do it again because it was such a terrible experience. But, unfortunately, theycan’t take that experience back, so they live the rest of their days in fearthat their relatives, their co-workers, or their children will find out, whichthey inevitably do.”

Secondly, as has been suggested, a shift to a politics of production demands a shift in focus from, as the title of another of MacKinnon’s books suggests Men’s Laws (or indeed Men’s Speech) to Women’s Lives. This asymmetry is structured as much by capitalism as it is by male supremacy, Alain Badiou in The Rebirth of History, writes of,  “what Marx regarded as the principal alienation of capitalism: the primacy of things over existence, of commodities over life” (p. 20). This inversion, of course, does not treat all existence as equal, reflected back onto existences is that those with many things enjoy primacy over those with no things. Badiou merges this description of alienation with the murder of Mark Duggan and the looting in the riots, “the destruction or theft of a few goods in the frenzy of a riot is infinitely more culpable than the police assassination of a young man…And here is the vicious idea spread by all this: the death of the young man – a ‘black hooligan’, no doubt…is nothing compared with all these additional costs.” (p. 19-20) We might note another comparison that the most repulsive lies can be spread without accountability about both Duggan and the women in pornography.

With pornography the shift entails replacing the shrill defence of the rights of the thing (the pornography) and its consumers with attention to what happens to women in the production of pornography. This attention, further, problematises the distinction made in the current legislation between “extreme” pornography- the suffering of women in whose productions is ignored by much of the Left- and, perhaps, “moderate”, “legitimate” pornography- the suffering of women in whose production is, a fortiori, ignored by much of the Left. Max Hardcore, quoted by Dines, boasts of his innovations, “Positions like pile driver, where I would gape the girls asses wide open, and provide a clear view for the camera, was unknown before I came along. I also created the technique of cumming in a girl’s ass, having her squeeze it out into a glass, and then chuck the load down…[I] developed many other unique maneuvers, most notably, vigorous throat fucking, creating gallons of throat slime over a girl’s upside down face, and even causing them to puke. A little later, I started pissing down their throats several times during a scene, often causing them to vomit uncontrollably while still reaming their throats.” It seems unclear whether the current legislation would necessarily cover any of this. The only acting in this kind of pornography is the woman’s enjoyment and freedom, MacKinnon suggests, “perhaps because this is a bourgeois culture the victim must look free, must appear to be freely acting.” (p. 172) Against capitalism’s inversion, the point cannot made enough, all these things are being done to a real woman. Capital’s inversions and bashful concealments of production underpin the argument that the thing (the pornographic image, speech) must be protected even, or rather especially, against the existence destroyed to produce it, as with Duggan, the women in pornography exist outside the law, able to be killed with impunity.