Left-Wing Pornography and Ideology Critique: Pornography and Late Capitalism: Autonomy, Liberation and Authenticity

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 two "An Aesthetics of Spectatorship or a Politics of Production?", 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 Part two. 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 Late Capitalism: Autonomy, Liberation, Authenticity

A politics of production with regard to pornography demands that pornography be situated within production, that is, within late capitalism. MacKinnon’s argument linking bourgeois culture to the lie of pornography (that the woman enjoys what is being done to her, that the woman has freely chosen to submit to what is being done to her) already begins to show how the brutality of pornography should be situated.

In The New Spirit of Capitalism, Boltanski and Chiapello analyse the post-1960s flourishing the “artistic critique” of capitalism based on “a desire for liberation, autonomy and authenticity” (p. 419) and the response entailing “forms of capitalism which have developed over the thirty years…incorporating whole sections of the artistic critique and subordinating it to profit-making.” (p. 420) The new left-wing pornography represents one of the most significant incorporations of the artistic critique and its subordination to profit making- “the dirty little secret of the left-wing pornography industry is not sex but commerce”- its grounding in a certain critique of capitalism, albeit one that has easily been subordinated to profit-making, explains some left-wing men’s, if one is being generous, confusion, if one is being less generous, desperate searching for alibis for complicity with rape. For many men on the left, pornography’s place within this critique of capitalism, justifies as progressive even utopian.

Liberation figures as liberation from repressive constraints. The generalisation of the Walsh case becomes problematic here, the homophobic prosecution of Walsh was an unjustifiable, moralistic instance of repression; conclusions about the Walsh case being generalised to pornography are illegitimate but clearly stem from an identification of all objections to pornography as stemming from the same repressive moralism which produces homophobia. Liberation becomes the tolerance of an almost limitless range of sexual tastes but pornography (unlike obscenity) is not a question of taste.

On the implications of the “sexual revolution”, Sheila Jeffreys is quite clear on the regressive aspect of liberation under continuing male supremacy, “The sexual revolution of the 60s added extra requirements. Not only were women to be enthusiastic about PIV sex, but they were to be sexually available outside marriage, and to accept more and more practices that were directed specifically towards men’s pleasure and potentially painful or degrading for themselves.” As Jeffrey’s argument suggests this version of liberation also entails the depiction of women on the left who object to pornography as prudish. Jeffreys’ critique of sexology (and Dworkin’s analogous critique in Pornography) offers an instructive parallel with Boltanski and Chiapello’s analysis of management manuals, as they write, “management discourse, which aims to be formal and historical, general and local, which mixes general precepts with paradigmatic examples, today constitutes the form par excellence in which the spirit of capitalism is incorporated and received”. (p. 14) Boltanski and Chiapello focus on management discourse and its justifications for capitalism because of, in contrast to what is stable and general about capitalism, its relative instability and sensitivity to critique. Management discourse after the 1960s internalizes the artistic critique of capitalism; the disruptive character of the artistic critique is blunted and made useful for the reproduction of capitalism; a parallel should be drawn with ‘60s and post ‘60s sexology, similarly the disruption occasioned by an artistic critique of capitalism and male supremacy was quickly reabsorbed and made useful for capitalism and male supremacy. Sundered from the critique of capitalism or male supremacy in management discourse or sexology, the artistic critique of capitalism produces a (of course non-Marxist and non-feminist) unity of theory and practice that serves to reproduce and strengthen what was critiqued.

The first aspect of autonomy in the new pornography is clear, autonomy is both the acting out of a free choice to participate in pornography and the reification of this acting in the left’s defence of pornography. This reification, bashfully, banishes commerce and the asymmetry of information, class relations and concrete economic factors which determine this “choice”, “the reality of porn today is largely hidden from young women,and what you get is a steady stream of working-class women looking to become“porn stars.” In a recession, working-class jobs for women are increasinglyhard to find, and they often offer a life of drudgery. Next to this porn looksvery glamorous. What I hear from many women in porn is that although theyconsented to be in porn, they had no idea what they were actually consentingto.” Autonomy here is constituted by banishing production, both what is involved in the production of the pornography and the wider relations of production that create a ready potential supply of porneia.

The banishing of production in pornography as autonomy, however, extends far beyond the collapsing of pornography and obscenity which for the left justifies the new pornography. To return to Benjamin on Proust, the brutality of the new pornography of Max Hardcore and others also amounts to a sadistic attempt to banish nature’s productive forces, which figures in left-wing pornography as man’s autonomy over both nature and women, which are linked by pornography’s unity of theory and practice. In The Arcades Project, Benjamin quotes Emmanuel Berl, “the metaphysical meaning of sadism is the hope that the revolt of man will take on such intensity as to summon nature to change its laws”, or, as Benjamin expands, having linked prostitution to technology (and how much stronger is this link in pornography, “technologized prostitution”), “the sexual revolt against love not only springs from the fanatical, obsessional will to pleasure; it also aims to make nature adaptable and obedient to this will.” (p.493) 

Modern pornography, similarly, aims the transcendence of natural bodily limits, as Dines writes, “These acts are played out on a living being who, like the rest of us, has certain bodily limits. The goal in gonzo is to push these limits to the maximum. I would bet that few of the women who enter porn know fully what is expected of them or that they have a short shelf life as the body cannot take such punishment for long.”

Marx himself, in “The Critique of the Gotha Programme”, attacks another “left” position, that of the German Workers’ Party, for internalizing the ideological transcendence and banishing of nature’s productive forces (or, indeed, nature as a limit), “labour is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use-values…as labour, which is itself only the expression of a natural power, human labour power…Only insofar as man acts as the proprietor of nature, the primary source of all the means and materials of labour, and treats nature as his own from the outset, does his labour become the source of use-values, and hence of wealth. The bourgeoisie have a very good reason to credit labour with a supernatural generative power; for it follows directly from the fact that nature is a precondition of labour, that a man who has no property other than his labour power must in all cultural and social circumstances be a slave to those who have become owners of labour’s material prerequisites.” (I) Pornography, as a commodity, as providing use-values as well as exchange-value, banishes nature, bashfully, in the case of its liberal defenders, who also bashfully, again, ignore labour in the production of pornography and the reasons for women entering into the industry. Marx, here, shows the links between these three bashful concealings. Pornography itself posits the supernatural generative power of men, an ideology and a practice of total domination tending towards the destruction of natural limits and, with them, the destruction of the body of the woman in pornography.

The new, left-wing pornography is authentic. In its authenticity, the banishing of traces of production is, quite systematically, abandoned within the images of pornography. Here the boasts of the producers of pornography and the radical feminist critique overlap. Authenticity, as in Max Hardcore’s bragging, exists in the proof that these things really have been done to a real woman; the gaping or vomiting testifies that this is not faked. The defenders of the new pornography are a long way behind its producers.

At this point the, utopian aspect of pornography (dimly and distortedly because particular in the service of domination), as part of its attraction for the left should become apparent. Pornography promises and constructs a world of limitless pleasure (for men), free of old-fashioned repression, free of natural (bodily) limits (for men, the way autonomy is made concrete is in the destruction of women’s bodies). Pornotopia, even more than Brecht’s village of Hollywood, expresses the efficiency of God, who “requiring a heaven and a hell, didn’t need to/ Plan twoestablishments but/ Just the one: heaven. It/ Serves the unprosperous,unsuccessful/ As hell.”   

Underpinning pornotopia, again mirroring anti-revolutionary Social Democracy, a facile and undialectical opposition between technology and nature, is an opposition which is crudely gendered: technology-male/ nature-female. Technology appears simply as anti-nature, as its overcoming, an overcoming that is possible merely through technology, not through revolution and collective mastery of technology, a collective mastery that, as Benjamin argues in “Theories of German Fascism” that, opposing the Fascist violent and immediate liberation from nature, offers the possibility technology can figure “not as a fetish of doom but a key to happiness.”

Progress for liberals and Social Democrats figures merely as progress in the technological mastery over nature. As Benjamin notes in “Theses in the Philosophy of History”, this ignores the “retrogression of society” (XI). The opposition technology-men/ nature-women results in treating women as the commons, men act, in general, as the proprietors of nature (women), as Dworkin writes, “left-wing ideology claims sexual freedom is in the unrestrained use of women, the use of woman as a collective natural resource, not privatized, not owned by one man but instead used by many.” (p. 207)

This suggests, alongside, the Social Democratic and Liberal advocates of pornography the possibility of a post-Autonomia “Communist” endorsement of pornography, ignoring the material labour of pornography and emphasizing the technological possibilities, through the internet, of the limitless, free reproducibility of pornography enabling the possibility of limitless, inexhaustible “communist” use of the women-commons. Indeed, abusive behaviour as a consequence of sexual liberation within enduring conditions of male supremacy provides the basis of the most powerful chapter of Nanni Balestrini’s, The Unseen, “we want to make it clear what shits you are what pieces of crap no different from other men despite giving yourselves airs as revolutionaries and the vanguard of the proletariat but in your relationships with us you’re the rearguard about the same level as my father and grandfather…you workers vanguard acting the trade union lover boy because I know very well how you prefer making your smart-alec interjections where there are women workers that way maybe you get to fuck one of them after the mass meeting…once upon a time it was the foremen who went after women in the assembly shops while now it’s the workers’ vanguards like you” (p. 150-1) (Post-New Objectivity lack of punctuation in the original, there’s an excellent post from Pierce Penniless on The Unseen here).  

Pornography, as well as being determined by technological changes in the means of distribution, can also drive technological progress. Dines argues, “porn has proven to be a reliable, highly profitable market segment that has accelerated the development of media technologies, from VCRs and DVDs to file-sharing networks, video on demand for cable, streamed video over the internet for PCs, and, most recently, video for mobile phones. Video uses vast quantities of data, and the demand for porn has driven the development of core cross-platform technologies for data compression, search, transmission and micro-payments.”

Figuring a technology that goes beyond the liberation from nature through its violent destruction so that it can serve as a key to happiness requires the overcoming of the abstraction of technology from societal retrogression. This overcoming displaces the progressive narrative by presenting the drivers of technological progress and the uses of technology, Adorno’s famous argument in Negative Dialectics, that there is a “unity that cements the discontinuous, chaotically splintered moments and phases of history- the unity of the control of nature, progressing to rule over men, and finally to that over men’s inner nature. No universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leading from the slingshot to the megaton bomb. It ends in the total menace that organized mankind poses to organized men, in the epitome of discontinuity.” (p. 320) Or, as Adorno, almost could have had it, no universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one that leads from the graffiti at Pompeii to gonzo porn. It ends in the total menace that organized mankind poses to often disorganized women, in the epitome of discontinuity.