Internet Pornography: constituting proletarianization
This paper will address four issues:
Cultural studies as a way of approaching pornography;
The transdisciplinary approach;
The articulation between pornography and the Internet;
Proletarianization as the class formation that emerges through the cultural
formation of pornography and the Internet.
The conclusion: how these four issues constitute a new way of analyzing culture,
as seen in pornography.
Cultural studies as a way of approaching pornography
Raymond Williams, one of the grand-parents of cultural studies, offered a
roadmap to the study of culture. His approach is applicable to the culture of the Internet
as much because the Internet is intrinsically connected to the history of media and
culture, as because the Internet is a technology that offers bright possibilities for new
cultural formations. Williams argued that the empirical cultural researcher who studied
the “phases of social consciousness which correspond to real social situations and
relations,” should avoid “social neutralizing.” By this he meant that a shift to the neutral
territory of “bourgeois cultural sociology” would use convenient yet shorthand ideas that
have taken hold in communication studies, like “effects,” “mass public,” “control” and
“socialization,” to replace the study of “complex sociology … within … the capitalist
system.” (136-137). While much has happened since Williams launched that critique in
his “Sociology of Culture” essay in 1977, the absence of a determined and critical
engagement with and study of the relationship between class and the Internet – indeed,
between media and class in general – suggests that bourgeois cultural studies is in fact
ascendant. Suffice to say, the relationship between the Internet and class is a significant
transformation of the global media space. However, much of the Internet’s content is not
welcome in “good homes,” which is to say the dominant spaces where “bourgeois
cultural sociology” is lived.
This cultural studies approach prompts two questions: How is social neutralizing
constituted in the era of the Internet? Does the Internet encourage a form of alienation
from the complex affairs of the world, or does it magnify them?
Critical work in cultural studies takes the challenge from Raymond Williams
seriously because the field is often not engaged in the key issues of the day. Pornography
is one such area where cultural studies has presented itself as liberal and thus socially
neutral. It is as if there is a moral location in which criticism does not occur of the private
space where the consumption of pornography takes place. It was in this type of context
that Manuel Castells noted that in the new global networked society the risks associated
with networked communication increase making “the management of anxiety [is] the
most useful personal skill” (2000:21). If, following Castells, anxiety is part of the
psychological energy that is brought to criticism – anxiety about ethical behavior, justice,
human decency, democracy, truth – then liberalism has failed to accommodate or take
seriously this anxiety.
How then should we approach the study of pornography?
Examining pornography in the Internet era, means that a new set of cultural
concerns have arisen that cannot be swept aside by liberal disinterest or active disregard
for difficult subjects. The Internet is an especially powerful location for pornography
because the Internet has facilitated and promoted the production and utilization of
pornography – as I will suggest later. If we take Raymond Williams and his
admonishment to heart, the relationship of pornography to the Internet demands new and
critical research approaches.
The transdisciplinary approach
One such approach can be seen in the transdisciplinary approach, advocated by
the Salzburg school of ICT (Hofkirchner et al. 2007). Advocates of “The Salzburg
Approach” have argued that a transdisciplinary approach is required as much for
functional reasons as for critical reasons to comprehend the scope of ICT in society. That
is, because it cannot be defined by discipline-derived concepts from discrete fields, the
Internet demands an open theoretical domain, where theories rise in an amalgam from
social networking, Web 2.0, virtual communities and media intertextuality to coalesce in
transdisciplinarity. “A transdiscipline,” they argue,
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is expected to bridge several gaps: the gap between the two cultures of (natural)
science and social and human sciences as well as the gap between specialists and
generalists as well as the gap between applied research and basic research.
The Salzburg approach promotes the non-classifiable characteristics of disciplines that
transect the natural sciences and the humanities through the dynamics of the Internet’s
converged concerns. The most appealing feature of Salzburg research orientation is the
restatement of the claim made by Helga Nowotny and Michael Gibbons that because
“transdisciplinarity does not respect institutional boundaries” its “knowledge is
transgressive” (Gibbons and Nowotny 2002, 70, in Hofkirchner et al. 2007, p. 12). It is
the rule breaking function of knowledge production within and through the Internet that
mobilizes the transdisciplinary approach. This obsolescence of institutional structures in
tandem with the rational claims to principles that have been codified in society and
continue in metastasized form in institutions, suggest that the transgressive view of
knowledge production operates across what already exists and what is coming into view.
The inherent dynamic of transgressive knowledge is part of the lengthy history of the
intersection of knowledge and technology in society.
Transdisciplinarity is not in itself anything more than a stated recognition of
complexity and the challenge that the Internet poses to established disciplines; plus the
general inability of interdisciplinary approaches. Surely the transgressions of Internet
knowledge need a theory that admits the old and the new. In this respect, Ned Rossiter
has offered “processual media theory” as a way of incorporating the already existing with
the transgressive newness of Internet media. The appeal of processual media theory is
that it is inherently transdisciplinary because it points out how “the unthought media of
aesthetics” are constituted, where “social and cultural forms are not determined by media
potentialities.”
A processual aesthetics of new media goes beyond what is simply seen or
represented on screen. It seeks to identify how online practices are always
conditioned by and articulated with seemingly invisible forces,
institutional desires and regimes of practice. Furthermore, a processual
aesthetics recognizes the material and embodied dimensions of Net
cultures. (2005, p. 174).
While there may be questions to ask about what aesthetics means here, the key point
refers back to transgressive knowledge, because the processual approach can “consider
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the technics of combining visual and tactile perceptions in certain ways and in certain
contexts to allow for distinct modes of understanding the world” (2005, p 175).
Pornography and the Internet
Pornography is a way of understanding the world that requires acceptance of
transgressive knowledge. Internet pornography insists on old and new questions, many of
them about class. Raising class is a transgressive act. It is out of fashion because it is
considered a redundant topic in liberal circles. The articulation of the Internet with
pornography raises class as an issue because the proliferation of material intended to
generate sexual arousal is available on line. This simple statement of the articulation of
the content with a new delivery or transport mechanism into global markets and to users
marks a significant change in the modality of pornography.
To provide an idea of the dimensions of what this means and the potential shifts
involved in the culture consider this: in 2008, about 3.3 billion people in the world will
use a mobile phone, about half the world’s population. (“Halfway There,” The
Economist, May31, 2008. p 68-69.) Mobile web access via cell phones is part of the
Third Generation (3G) system and will become increasingly available around the world.
In China alone, 14 million users of Opera Sofware, viewed 3billion web pages in the
month of June alone, a 300 percent increase on a year earlier, according to The Economist
(“The meek shall inherit the web,” September 6, 2008, Technology Report, p.3).
Streaming pornography is generally available to web users, although some of the
software barriers installed for national portals and by ISPs restrict access. The fact is that
the circulation of pornography has intensified like never before.
Given the numbers, it is surprising that more discussion does not take place of this
powerful shift in the global culture, due to mobile telephony. I suggest that a significant
amount of social neutralizing of the Internet space has in fact occurred. An additional
explanation is that the transgressive knowledge that accompanies pornography itself is
problematic in many liberal research contexts.
Proletarianization
Proletarianization is the move of otherwise regulated images of human behavior
via the Internet to the monitor space. In this private space it is reproduced as a
commodity in the market, where it may find its use value in its social function, not in a
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market-based exchange value. The complexity of this formation is new and powerful
because it brings very large numbers of people into an intense association with
capitalism. Furthermore, pornography brings otherwise regulated behavior into the
private space of the computer monitor – including cell phones. This complex of
interactions engages users with the production and consumption of culture in new locales,
across new territories with new implications for human values. The question is what
values? My argument is that because the Internet is unregulated – generally speaking and
from the hegemonic perspective of the US and its free speech ideals – it offers a way of
bringing regulated, or otherwise repressed, illegal proletarian culture and values into
circulation.
Returning to the transdisciplinary: proletarianization is the circulation of
transgressive knowledge. It is the formation of class associations that emerge through the
production of Internet images transmitted over the Internet.
Conclusion
Cultural studies as a critical practice offers a way of approaching pornography
that does not reproduce “social neutralizing.” It sees that there is something at stake –
issues of ethics, truth and class. Transdisciplinarity offers a way forward because it brings
to the foreground transgressive knowledge – those cultural formations that have been
rejected as unsuitable for liberal debate and have therefore been regulated within liberal
democracies. The articulation between pornography and the Internet raises new
questions about class. What is the key question? The key question is what is happening
in the culture with pornography on the Internet? The subsidiary question is how does this
articulation of pornography as an expression of unregulated proletarian culture connect
with global capitalism? My answer and my theory, is that proletarianization emerges as a
cultural formation because of the articulation of pornography and the Internet.
Marcus Breen Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Department of Communication Studies
Northeastern University
Boston
m.breen@neu.edu
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