This text was originally published in Galician in the catalogue LOST IN SOUND (CGAC, Santiago de
Compostela, 2000) and reprinted in the magazine Banda Aparte, No 18. Valencia, May 2000.
THE EYE SATURATED WITH PLEASURE: ON FRAGMENTATION,
PORNO- EVIDENCE AND BRICO-TECHNOLOGY
Maria Ruido
“After a sober working week, the Shakers met on Sundays to worship. In the Circular
Dance, lines of men and women formed four concentric moving circles. The dance
liberated the group's individual sins and helped them achieve a collective purity. (...)
The group cried, Shake! Shake! Shake! Christ is with you.”
Dan Graham. “Rock My Religion: Writings and art projects 1965-1990”, (1993).
The Party
Dance, dance, you damn ... up to ecstasy, to abandonment, to loss.
From the Greek Maenads, the Oriental Dervishes, the Americanindian Dance of the
Spirits' dancers, the Carnival frenzied dances or the puritan preindustrial Shakers to
the flexible wiggles of the rock&roll idol or the absorbed concentration in the rhythm
of the rave, the presence of the body transported by the sound (and almost always, by
drugs) appear as the vehicle(s) of ecstatic pleasure, as the interruption(s) of the
Dionysian, of the rite, of the myth, in the everyday order, established by rationality
and work/production.1
Although the dancing outburst was not exclusive of the young people, in the late
capitalist western society, the rituals of adolescence/youth seem to be especially
linked to this new mysticisms, the community of the club dancers, as a specifically
articulated manner to challenge the prevailing power structure: rock is my new
religion, said Patti Smith, undoubtedly, the voice of the feelings of a whole
generation; as showed by Dan Graham in his complex video “Rock My Religion”
(1982), where the phallic, Oedipal sexuality of the rock star movements, generates the
same community energy that the one emerged during the religious celebrations; that is
what the new techno music ceremonies suggest: "Nothing better than the raves, these
modern bacchanals, to be able to find out what is happening in our time, in our
community, in this community that, from now on, has to invent itself, coexisting with
1
See among others, Nietzsche, F.: “El nacimiento de la tragedia”. Alianza. Madrid, 1973 o
Bajtin, M.:”La cultura popular en la Edad Media y en el Renacimiento. El contexto de François
Rabelais”. Alianza. Madrid, 1998.
the collapse of myths and ideologies".2
The body, the rhythm, the gaze; the pleasure provided by contemplation, the glimpse:
the movement of the contemporary eye has the cadence of the TV and the trajectories
of our bodies on TV. Simulacra of ecstasy in high technology.
Postmodernity, leveller and blurring of hierarchies, breaks the limits between cultural,
social and economic fields, and adjusts the rhythm of the piece of news, the
digression or the scandal to the rhythm of the video-clip, the one of the hegemonic
advertisement discourse, predator, vacuous, superficial... fascinating, parasite imitator
of the avant-garde: superposition and montage versus cause-effect narrative,
interruption versus continuity, flow/drift versus structural predetermination; it could
be described as a commitment to the poetic discourse in opposition to the linear
narrative discourse of modernity, but the space of production of meaning opened by
poetry is dissolved in the imaginary intensity/excrescence of the clip by the
pragmatism of purchase, by the imposition of a model.3
Bricolage, compulsive hybridization, cannibalism of the fragment, acceptance of the
fragment (acoustic / textual / representational / corporal), which is contaminated,
mixed. As the rules of thermodynamics explain with regard to energy, nothing is
created, everything is transformed.
Firstly, the self-contemplation in the mirror, then the alien eye, the scopic pleasure
conforming/normativizing eye that apprehends the meat to turn it into significationlanguage. The visual system of difference attempts to coordinate the fragment, the
first perception of our own body, and build a false continuity that sustains the Subject,
the model citizen of the modern state; but transgressed the false speculate continuity
in its rupture (or as Alice, in the passage to the other side of the mirror), the fragment
becomes the only possibility of representation of the contemporary body (unfinished,
with imprecise limits, processual in its re-elaboration capacity).
After the canonical continuity, the addition of fragments conforms a feasible body
beyond the Apollonian structure of containment, the grotesque body built by
juxtaposition, impossible to synthesize, reemerges: the neo-grotesque bodies
(cybergrotesque) develop the energy of the party, of the disruptive practices within
the inexhaustible flow of production.
“My reading of Bajtin and, more specifically, his notion of “grotesque body”
developed through his study of Rabelais, emerges from the attempt to define a new
typology of the subject in the moment in which we witness the dissolution of the individual- body of modernity. (...)
The cybergrotesque body is the technological-grotesque one. (...) As proposed by
Donna Haraway4, a type of writing inscribed in the technological while being defined,
2
Gaillot, Michel: “Del mix al mestizaje”. Zehar , nº 36. Donosti, primavera 1998 (pág. 12).
3
See Puig, Luís & Talens, Jenaro: “Rock, cuerpo y simulacro”. Zehar , nº 35. Donosti, invierno 1997
(págs. 20-25).
4
Text refers to the "A cyborg manifesto: science, technology and socialist-feminism in the
late twentieth century" (1990), included in Haraway, Donna: "Science, cyborgs and women. The
which opens up to the “alien world” and is traversed by it, intersected by the social
practices in which that subject is.”5
Bricolage appears, then, as a specific resistance practice against the totalizing
coherence of modern imposition, against the absorption of the differences in search of
the unity, the centrality; it becomes a multiplicity strategy, an strategy of disrespect
for productivity and efficiency in the advanced capitalism: in opposition to the
producer appears the re-producer, elaborator of a devalued product within the modern
canons because of the lack of originality “aura”.
“It is a renunciation of the modernist ‘aura’ of the artist as a producer. As Crimp says:
‘The fiction of the creative subject is to give rise to the confiscation, the quotation, the
extract, the accumulation and repetition of already existing images’ ”6
Devalued originality and loss of the real referent: the postmodern simulacrum
abandons the mimesis and constructs an alternative hyperreality where the trajectory
is reversed, where nature imitates art, where the tyranny of the fictitious prevails.
The Author, the modern demiurge, creator from nowhere, assumes his pertinence to
the generating palimpsest, to the referential intertextuality. The reader occupies the
text/image, constructing it with his reading, far from the disciplinary authority of the
unique interpretation: “A text consists of multiple writings, coming from various
cultures, which establish a dialogue among each other, a parody, a contestation; but
there is a place where all this multiplicity meets, and that place is not the author, as it
has been said until today, but the reader. (…)
We know that we must turn the myth over in order to return writing its future: the
birth of the reader is paid with the death of the Author. "7
Cannibal genre par excellence, techno (or, rather, the diverse forms of constructed
electronic music) practices this hybridization (from rock to disco-gay, going through
jazz free interpretation), this de-contextualization is also asumed by literature and
images, becoming the most radical contemporary proposal of the end of this century,
both in its imbrication with new technologies (samplers, drum machines, synthesizers,
computers with computer sequencer) and in its re-reading of the concept of originality
and authorship: scratch and sampling definitely break with the romantic myth of the
artist, with the underlined signature of the pop-rock star, and announce the beginning
of the operator, the re-elaborator, the creator channeler/catalytic.
“By the way, is a DJ an artist? This naive and recurrent question has been tormenting
the human minds since the advent of what is called techno culture. But, does this
question makes sense when the time of the mutation and the new fusion between the
reinvention of nature. " Chair. Madrid, 1995.
5
Colaizzi, Giulia: “The cyborguesque”. Episteme. Valencia, 1995 (págs. 1 y 3).
6
Harvey, David: “La condición de la posmodernidad”. Amorrortu. Buenos Aires, 1998
(pág. 75).
7
Barthes, Roland: “La muerte del autor” in “El susurro del lenguaje”. Paidós. Barcelona,
1994 (pág. 71).
fields of art and pop culture is already here? (...)
We can say that the DJ status is symptomatic of the dissolution of the current artist
role. It channels the information flows, shapes and recycles them with great skill, as
well as many artists that, of course, have nothing in common with their predecessors
of the 19th century. As many of these new actors of the contemporary scene, the
status of the artist is meaningless. In the field of art and culture, there are many of
them who currently perform diverse functions, one after the other.”8
Representational bri-collage, appropriationism, quotation: is it politically operative
the deconstructive and ironic utilization of the products integrated in the mechanisms
of the hegemonic power?
“In 1982, Martha Rosler wrote an article entitled ‘Notes on Quotes’, focused on the
ineffectiveness of appropriation and quotation as a suitable political strategy: “Which
alternative view does that work propose? The work does not provide us the interior
space that would allow us to understand how things could be different. We can only
imagine a respite out of the social life, the alternative is merely Edenic or utopian.”
(...)
From the moment in which the art work “is enclosed in the production relations of its
own cultural sphere”, and it is limited to the terms of an interrogation of generic
forms of domination, rather than a specific one, it would not be able to perform an
educational function, and much less, a transforming one.9
In opposition to the rigid posture of Rosler, Abigail Solomon-Godeau recalls, the decontextualization of the media icons could be a highly effective critical practice if it
does not fall into the assimilable formula, if, by the continuous drift and shift, it
prevents (or at least difficults) the mercantile banalization feedback: “the art practices
that are based more on the production of their own styles rather than on constantly
modified interventions, may be particularly vulnerable to the neutralization of their
alleged criticism. As noted by several theorists, a resistance position should never be
established once and forever, but it must be perpetually redone and renewed in order
to properly treat those conditions and circumstances that are its own cause.”10
Bricolage-resistance to production, re-reading of the consumption product and
elaboration-recycling that goes against the linear development, the indefinite progress,
the teleological narrative of the meta-story: iconic and musical appropriationism,
construction on the basis of pre-existing pieces, that is what the electronic club music
is, the one that rocks the re-signified bodies, postbiologic, anticanonical, heirs of the
abjection of the grotesque medieval carnival and the antireproductive bodies of Sade.
Against the modern body, closed, preestablished, of precise limits, finished, those
8
Barbichon-Leloup, Jean-Yves: “Digital Clash”. Zehar , nº 35. Donosti, invierno 1997 (págs.
27-28).
9
Solomon-Godeau, Abigail: “Vivir la contradicción: prácticas críticas en los tiempos de la
estética de oferta y demanda” in “100%” (Catálogo). Junta de Andalucía/Ministerio de Cultura.
Sevilla, 1993 (págs. 223-224).
10
Solomon-Godeau, Abigail: op. cit. (1993) (pág. 238).
bodies, heirs of the abjection, as expressed by Julia Kristeva, the new grotesque
bodies, unsubmissive to the canon, are obscene, liminal, liquid.
“It is not a lack of cleanliness or health what causes the abjection, but what perturbs
the identity, the system, the order. That, what does not respect boundaries, borders,
positions, rules. That, what is in the middle, the ambiguous, the mixed.”11
Our body, political construction affected by the social legitimation in the form of
technified surveillance, more or less subtle psychological pressures and different
paradigmatic impositions, transgresses (or attempts to transgress) the singularity of
the rule, the permanence within the stipulated, as demanded by the normativizing
state control: effective bodies for work, canonically beautiful bodies for
contemplation, decently sexual bodies for a moderate desire, reproductive (female)
bodies and militarized (mostly male) bodies to perpetuate the model stipulated by
supply and demand.
In this context, the party, the cadence of the bodies to the rhythm of the bricotechnologic music is an interruption, a parenthesis, a subtraction to the imposition and
the lure.
From the most commonly consumed substances (drugs named as candies, which
encourage the approximation and the physical contact but not sexual practices such as
penetration), to the music elaborated by the DJ's from the montage of pre-existing
sounds and themes, the rave could be read as a metaphor of the pleasure associated to
young people and their form of opposing to the rhythm of work that awaits them in
their transition to adulthood; it could also be interpreted as the conscious adoption of
diffuse and polymorphous sexuality practices in opposition to the phallic (and
reproductive) sexuality of the Oedipal order, as a ludic evidence of the social
masquerade of the generic stereotypes, the interpreted/performatized12 sexual
identities: in the undifferentiated and soft (pre-Oedipal) half-light of the rave, it still
exists the touch and the slight insistence of the lips.
“Touched by the invisible. In the invisible. There, where the shift from the hands to
the lips takes place. The lips, whatever we are thinking of, never cross the visual field
of their own body. The eye cannot see them. They belong to two independent body
organizations, heterogeneous, exclusive.”13
But it is also true that this pre-symbolic placidity of the rave, the deliquescent ecstasy
of the body dancing/feeling in the club, it is no more than a socially controlled
parenthesis, accepted, almost prescribed, before the eye and the body converge in the
11
Kristeva, Julia: “Pouvoirs de l’horreur” (1980) citada en Nead, Lynda: “El desnudo
femenino. Arte, obscenidad y sexualidad”. Tecnos. Madrid, 1998 (pág. 57).
12
Regarding the definition of an unstable gender identity consciously incorporated in the
postmodernity see, for example, Butler, Judith: “Gender trouble. Feminism and the subversion of
identity”. Routledge. Nueva York, 1990 o Butler, Judith: ”Gender trouble, feminist theory and
psycoanalytic discurse” in Nicholson, Linda (ed.): “Feminism/Postmodernism”. Routledge. Nueva
York, 1990.
13
Hollier, Denis: “Ce sexe qui n’en a pas d’autre” en “Fémininmasculin” (Catálogo). Centre
Georges Pompidou. París, 1995 (pág. 325).
social rules, in the patriarchal order of the difference.
The huge business volume generated by the techno music and aesthetics reminds us of
the important acquisitive power (and, therefore, the great attention that they generate
in the market) of these young consumers, these pre-adults pre-producers of hugely
elongated adolescences in which we all have turned into: the artificial paradise bought
with the family money, the little breakout before assuming the limits of self-control.
Even sharing, to a great extent, the enthusiasm of Barbichon-Leloup, (“The electronic
utopia is due to a plethora of independent lebels and artists to whom the fame is
something totally secondary, while the positive values of participation, are paramount.
(...) What is even better, the over-production, the speed of movement and the short
life of the works are the order of the day”14), we must underline that the
mercantilization and the adoption of strategies guided by the needs of marketing and
consumption are a common practice in the techno culture, and as Susan Bordo
reminds us, the supposed postmodern cyborg’s infinite capacity to redefine its limits,
the immense variety that the menu of surgery seems to provide, may become a new
paradigmatic tyranny based on the fallacious multiplicity of neoliberalism, on the
fictitious and neutralizing comfort of the postmodern neo-humanism:
“The rhetoric of choice and self-determination and the carefree analogy with cosmetic
surgery that allows us to reshape ourselves is deeply mystified. We must consider, not
only the inequalities of opportunities, money and time, but also the desperation of
those who do it. (...) We are surrounded by the homogenization and normalization of
images, images that contain and cover up the generic domain, the racial one, the one
related to class and to other cultural iconographies.15
The insubordination of the postbiologic body must be, necessarily, a rupture with all
the hierarchies, with the canons in any of their forms, with the order of capital; it must
be, necessarily, a community response, dialectic, that challenges the univocal desire
model, the taxonomization of true sex, beyond the superficial intervention: the new
body/discourse (obscene-abject-impure-mestizo), is the one that assumes itself as a
collective political territory, the one that exceeds the limits of the Cartesian subject, of
the public-private dichotomy, the one that questions the unique pleasure of the eye.
"In a world ordered by sexual inequality, the pleasure of looking is divided between
active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its fantasies on
the female figure, which organizes itself accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist
role, women are both observed and exhibited.
Laura Mulvey. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (1975)
The pleasure of the eye.
The representation of the body has been, within the limits of Western culture,
14
15
Barbichon-Leloup, Jean-Yves: op. cit. (1997) (pág. 28).
Bordo, Susan: “ ‘Material Girl’: The effacements of postmodern culture” in Goldstein, Laurence
(ed.): “The Female Body”. University of Michigan Press. Michigan, 1991 (págs. 109-110).
associated to the specular reflection of the child on his first months of life and to the
precarious recognition of his limbs as a coordinated entity, continuous after the
limited and fragmentary experience of the touch and the eye on his meat.16
This fallacious gestalt collectively consensed has unequivocally related the terms
body-image-identity, allowing no slight repositioning fissure among them: you are
what you see, and your image, the image of your body, conforms your social-sexual
identity.
The power of the eye, the organ of the scopic pleasure, imperative in our patriarchal
culture, becomes evident: the eye legitimizes the order of sexual difference
established on the lack of the signifier phallus, and confines women to a position of
passive objects of the gaze, an eminently male territory, when expelling them from
the privileged metaphor of power.
"Your face hits the side of my face" (Barbara Kruger, 1981): having the eye, the gaze,
is having the control of the body, as well as the language, the instrument of the
elaboration of the symbolic, codified around the phallus and the lack of it.
The impossibility of accessing to the phallus means, for women, the impossibility of
accessing to the territory of culture, to the symbolic transcendence and to the
language-code; the access to culture within the Oedipal model seems to, necessarily,
go through the acceptance of the binary system of oppositions and the assumption of
the authority patterns associated with the masculine to get out of the immanence, of
the margins of the knowledge exile and its transmission.
The search for an answer to this tyranny of the gaze and for an alternative to the
univocal pleasure became one of the fundamental debates within feminism since the
70s, and it has appeared, central or tangentially, in the work of many of the
postmodern artists in recent decades.
Laura Mulvey's text “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (first published in
1975), became a fundamental work within the debate around the scopic pleasure.
Based on the discourse of psychoanalysis applied to cinema, Mulvey reflects on the
colonization of the male gaze and the mechanisms for obtaining pleasure, basically
distinguishing two, voyeurism (the narcissistic assimilation of the contemplated
object) and fetishization (the conversion of woman’s body into fetish-phallus to
neutralize the fear of sexual difference), and she decisively concludes that the only
valid form of critical response for women is the destruction of the narrativecinematographic scopic pleasure through the evidence of the camera (alter ego of the
eye), the distancing (non-identification) and de-aestheticization (de-fetishization) of
the body, or even a complete denial/disappearance of the female body, even at the
cost of the loss of the own visual pleasure.
“The first impulse against the monolithic accumulation of traditional film conventions
(already undertaken by radical filmmakers) consists on releasing the gaze from the
camera through its materiality in time and space and the public gaze through the
16
See Lacan, Jacques: “El estadio del espejo como formador de la función del yo” in “Escritos” (vol.
1). Siglo XXI. México, 1995.
dialectic, through the passionate distancing. There is no doubt that this destroys the
satisfaction, the pleasure and the privileges of the “invisible guest”, and it is shown
how the cinema has been depending on the active/passive mechanisms of voyeurism.
Women, whose image has been continuously stolen and used for this purpose, cannot
contemplate the decline of the traditional cinematographic form, if it is not, at least,
with a sentimental wail.17
A symptom of the deep significance of Laura Mulvey's ideas on women's filmmaking
could be, for example, the film “Light Reading” (1978) by the British Lis Rhodes,
where the feminine body disappears, fades to black in the absence of the image,
giving rise to the reflective word regarding the treatment of women's body and to the
evidence of the film parts in the editing room, a negation-cancellation of the image
that Marguerite Duras will then use in “L'Homme Atlantique” (Atlantic Man) (1982)
in this case, as a device to show the pain of loss.
Not only within the field of cinema, but also in the field of video-action or in the
sculpture and installation ones, the footprint of this analysis is perceived. This is the
case of the substitute representation devices used by Felix Gonzalez-Torres in his
portraits without presence, where he swaps the bodies for words, or the bodies for
candies, or the bodies for the traces of bodies, or as in Martha Rosler’s video-action
“Vital Statistics of a Citizen, Simply Obtained” (1977): the objectualization, the
mediatized self-contemplation, the colonized visual codes, the biopower panopticism
denounced by the philosopher Michel Foucault; surveillance and punishment, tense
vulnerability, scientific taxonomization, the latest and highly effective instrument of
social regulation, statistics, as a measure of body, as a strategy of archive.
This “pleasure paranoia” (in the words of the theoretician Amelia Jones) that invades
the 70s (maybe a form of moral superiority of the feminism within the control over
the body, incorporating the atavistic puritanism of its beginnings?) is revised since the
beginning of the 80s, even by Mulvey herself or others sharing her unpleasurable
position such as Mary Ann Doane18, proposing solutions that tinge the previous
categorical denial (I am referring to Mulvey's “transsexual identification” or Doane's
“overidentification”)19 and that allow the feminine gaze a non-guilty pleasure over the
bodies and the cinematographic narration: the evidence of femininity as a masquerade
and the masquerade as an exonerating and playful “modality” also make possible the
reflection on the resignification-repositioning space between the body and its
reflection, they enable a gaze-drift that defines itself, as the body, as a construct and,
thus, as an habitable territory for women without the need to assume the unique code
of the scopic Oedipal-fetishizing pleasure, neutralizer of difference, of all differences.
At the same time, the explicitation of the not always necessary correspondence
between our identity and the reflection-image revises the basic codes of
17
Mulvey, Laura: “Placer visual y cine narrativo”. Episteme. Valencia, 1988 (pág. 21).
18
I am referring, specifically, to the texts “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative
Cinema’ inspired by ‘Duel in the Sun’ “ (1981) de L. Mulvey and “Film and the Masquerade:
theorising the female spectator” (1982) de M.A. Doane.
19
Véase Herrmann, Anne: “ ‘Passing’ women, performing men” in Goldstein, Laurence
(ed.): op. cit. (1991).
representation, stressing the conventional and historic character of the images, as well
as the restructuring ability that we can operate over them and their social meanings.
The gaze (unidirectional, voyeuristic, totalizing) may also turn into a political
intervention agent if, as Craig Owens explains very well on his analysis of Barbara
Kruger's work, it is able to distance itself from the paralyzing stereotype and to
activate itself in the short space of its trajectory: between the horrified eye of Medusa
when she contemplates her reflection in the mirror and her death (the death of her
will), there is a very short distance that the coded- stereotypical representation
attempts to neutralize, preventing the activation of our ability to intervene, what the
psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan called, quite graphically, the suture: the “Medusa
effect” immobilizes, captures our ability of re-signification, as the phallocratic
discourse objectifies women's body.
"The psychoanalytic concept of suture seems to have an apotropaic effect. (...) I
propose that from now on, we re-baptize the suture -the pseudo-identification of an
initial moment of the gaze and a terminal moment of paralysis- as the “Medusa
effect”: spectacular trick , (imaginary) identification of the clairvoyant and the gaze,
mediaticity, capture, stereotype. "20
As Barbara Kruger displays in one of her most expressive photomontages (the pined
silhouette of a woman sitting in a chair), “We have received orders not to move”
(1982).
As early as the 90s decade, women artists (especially those who are working in the
field of video-action) such as Karen Finley, Sadie Benning, Suzie Silver, Vanalyne
Green, Laura Kipnis, radicalize the position of the first generation of feminism and
propose new possibilities for the elaboration of a pleasant female gaze (from the
adoption of the most hackneyed voyeurism to the critique of the subject-object
binomial established around the vision, going through the adoption of a joyful autoobjectification) very critical with the radical negation of the 70s: “Though I suppose
that, what Rosler had in mind as a response to her video was something like a radical
rejection of the dominant forms of representation, it had always been a fallacy of the
left and the feminism of the 70s to think you can intimidate the plebs in order to
illustrate them, accusing them of their pleasures, scolding them for their moral
failures, not offering anything to them in the field of vision and utopia, and,
moreover, expecting them to submit obediently. What Rosler proposes, besides
making the spectator feel bad, is the authority of her own analysis, that is, more
authority. Such analysis is completely anti-dialectical and, to a great extent,
ahistorical.21
In opposition to the disruptive and, perhaps, somewhat moralistic discourse of the
feminism of the 70s, the feminism of the 90s tries to recover the sense of pleasure and
to incorporate a non-colonized gaze to its repertoire.
Beyond deaestheticization and negation, the irony of the pose comes up, the
20
Owens, Craig: “The Meduse effect or, the spectacular ruse” in “We won’t play nature to your
culture” (Catálogo). I.C.A. Londres, 1983 (pág. 10).
21
Kipnis, Laura: “Transgresión de mujer”. Erreakzioa/Reacción , nº 9. Bilbao, 1999 (pág.35).
appropriation and decontextualization of the standardized resources, the acceptance of
the fragment as a reflection weapon, the critical distance primarily supported on the
new analysis of a gender identity that is assumed as conjunctural, the review of
feminism itself and its use of the “guilt-inducing” resources, as well as the inside
critiques, regarding its ethnocentrism, classism and colonialism.
From the occlusion to the evidence or the new resistance devices against the visual
colonization: it does not mean a de-ideologization or, at least, not necessarily, but the
opening of the political limits of class and gender to the multiplicity of variants, to the
differences within the otherness, despite the obvious over-dimensionality that, in
some cases, factors like the sexual preference may be taking, in detriment of others,
which are equally significant; the re-elaboration of the concept “political art” in the
inclusion of privacy and of one of the most important experiences related to privacy,
the pleasure.
The evidence turned into a critical operational strategy or how to read pornography as
a form of deaestheticization through the over-saturation.
“’Setting as political the genuine terms through which identity is articulated’,
emphasizes the urgency of the project of politicizing sexuality instead of sexualizing
politics."
Giulia Colaizzi. "The Cyborguesque" (1995)
The saturation of the eye.
From the beginning of the 80's, pornography and the use/objectification of the
feminine body within the classical artistic imaginary and the media became one of the
most controversial debates within feminism, polarized around two basic positions led
by the American feminist movement: on the one hand, the feminists who were in
favor of the censorship of pornography (gathered around the group “Women Against
Pornography” created in 1979), led by authors such as Catharine MacKinnon and
Andrea Dworkin and, on the other hand, an heterogeneous collective of theoreticians
and artists who came together to defend an anti-censorship stance and to provoke a
debate around desire and social relations related to sex. This collective is structured
from the edition of the book "Women against censorship”, later converted into an
activist group, and integrated by authors such as Gayle Rubin, Carole Vance and
Angela Carter.
"Pornography is a medium through which sexuality is socially constructed, a
construction site, a domain to exert. It constructs women as things for sexual use and
it constructs consumers to desperately desire women who desperately desire
possession, cruelty and dehumanization. The very inequality, the very subjugation,
the very hierarchy, the very objectification, as well as the static abandonment of the
personal determination is the apparent content of the desire and the desired character
for women. “The big issue of pornography as a genre”, writes Andrea Dworkin in
“Pornography”(1983) - is the male power."22
22
MacKinnon, Catharine: “Hacia una teoría feminista del estado”. Cátedra.
These are some of the arguments that C. MacKinnon wields to achieve the
pornography censoring law in the U.S. since the early 80s, and in her effort to achieve
it she does not hesitate to join forces with the most reactionary faction of the Reagan
administration: the so-called Meese Commission meet throughout 1986 with the
intention of restricting the circulation of sexually explicit material. Although this
Commission never achieved consensus agreements (among other reasons, because of
difficulties they found when defining the limits of the pornographic), it advised a
series of restrictive legal measures (even among adults by common consent) related to
practices such as oral sex or anal penetration, reminiscences of the tightest controls
and taxonomizations of the sexual anti-reproductive modalities or those outside the
limits of normative heterosexuality, which appear in our modern culture since the
18th century.23
This persecution of the public sale and the production of images and texts tagged as
pornographic, led MacKinnon and Dworkin to the elaboration of an anti-pornography
law for the city of Minneapolis in 1983.24
This author's (and in general, the whole radical feminism) very negative assessment
of the sexual revolution of the 60s and 70s and its denunciation (regardless of the
increased diffusion due to the media) of the increasing aggression and physical
violence cases against women, convert this group of theoreticians in a new version of
the fin de siècle puritanism spread among the suffragettes, associating always and
necessarily violence, sex and prostitution, in a narrow and ahistorical assimilation:
"Pornography, which participates in rape and prostitution, institutionalizes the
sexuality of male supremacy, which fuses the eroticisation of dominance and
submission with the social interpretation of masculine and feminine.25
This pseudo-essentialist retreat phenomenon has much to do with the conjuncture and
the internal dynamics of the feminist movement in the U.S., dismembered and
silenced by the increasing reinstalation of conservatism since the early 80s after
having achieved a remarkable social influence during the previous decade: the fight
against pornography is presented, in those moments, as a quick way of reunification,
as a new alliance among women (some women who threatened homogeneity claiming
the acceptance of their cultural differences, sexual orientation, ethnicity, class ...
within the feminist movement itself), which, additionally, neutralized the sense of
threat that for men involved the questioning of the traditional positions of the couple
and the normative sexuality because, after all, it did nothing more than returning
women to the asexual role assigned by the bourgeois game of romantic relationships
from the beginning of modernity.
However, as we suggested earlier, not all women agree with this line of action. In
1982, a symposium is organized in the Barnard College at Columbia University,
23
See, among others, Foucault, Michel: “Historia de la sexualidad”(3 vols.). Siglo XXI. Madrid, 1995 o
Weeks, Jeffrey; “El malestar de la sexualidad”. Talasa. Madrid, 1993.
24
For more information about the Meese Commission and the anti-pornography by
MacKinnon-Dworkin consult the book by Osborne, Raquel: “La construcción sexual de la realidad”. Cátedra.
Madrid, 1993.
25
MacKinnon, C.: op. cit. (1995) (pág. 355).
entitled “Towards the politics of sexuality” (which papers were edited, for the first
time, by Carole Vance in 1984 under the title "Pleasure and Danger")26 that opened a
debate that differed from the anti-pornography stance.
Authors such as the already mentioned Carole Vance, Alice Echols, Gayle Rubin,
Alisson Assiter, Pat Califia, Brian McNair, etc ... have expressed, in the course of
almost two decades, their opposition to censorship and the need for establishing,
within feminism itself, an analysis of sexuality that allows the exoneration of pleasure
in any of its forms and the reflection, without reductionism and taking always into
account the historical context, on the causes of the pornographic representation and its
social use: feminism cannot turn into a new moral normative to control women's
sexuality and censor their differences.
"If the personal is political, then, perhaps, the political was personal, thus, turning the
efforts to change and reform the sexual life into substitute of the action and the
political organization. In that case, the scrutiny, the criticism and the surveillance of
the lives and even the sexual fantasies of our partners could become a necessary
political obligation.
The search for a politically appropriate sexual behaviour has led to what Alice Echols
calls “normative attitude”, the tendency to convert general principles such as equality,
autonomy and self-determination into specific and rigid models to which all feminists
are expected to adapt theirselves. (...) Hence, statements that are truly prescriptive
(“women should avoid penetration”). No doubt there are deliberate chauvinist
attempts.27
From the collective of lesbian women (kept in the periphery within feminism itself),
some divergent responses to the supposed "egalitarian" and "delicate" nature of sex
between women and the alleged exclusion of practices associated to heterosexuality
appear. From the "political lesbianism" exposed by Sheila Jeffreys to the
interpretation of butch/femme roles close to the idea of performative or interpretive
identity of Judith Butler, there is a wide space for differences, the differences of these
women who share an option, the sexual one, always conjunctural and historically
frameworked: "The “feminist erotic” that presents a simplistic image of lesbian sex two women in love, together in the bed, which embody all the positive things that
patriarchy pretends to destroy- is not overly sexy."28
Far from the biased proposals of liberalism entrenched in individual liberty as the
measure of any action (measures against which MacKinnon cleverly lashes out), the
anti-pornography and its censorship strategy not only appears as a regulative and
reductionist stance with regard to the pleasure, but it suffers from a severe lack of
26
See Vance, Carole (comp.): “Placer y peligro: explorando la sexualidad femenina”. Revolución.
Madrid, 1989. Besides the book by Vance, see, among others, Assiter, Alison & Carol, Avedon: “Bad Girl &
Dirty Pictures”. Pluto Press. Boulder (Colorado), 1993.
27
Vance, Carole: “El placer y el peligro: hacia una política de la sexualidad” en Vance, Carole (comp.):
op. cit. (1989) (pág. 43).
28
Califia, Pat: “Macho Sluts” (1989) citada en Jeffreys, Sheila: “La herejía lesbiana”. Cátedra. Madrid,
1996 (pág. 63).
historical contextualization and political analysis: pornography is not the cause of
violence against women, but a symptom of the hierarchical exercise of power, of the
situation of economic and social subsidiarity that women still occupy within the
patriarchal order and a very clear example of the border set by the capitalist bourgeois
ideology between the private and the public, the visible and the invisible, the History
and the life.
Desexualize violence, devictimize, exonerate the (own) pleasure, may be political
objectives shared by feminism; (self-)objectification necessarily means the occlusion
as a subject only if we revalidate the classic exclusive binarism of our traditional
thinking: "Pornographers are the enemies of women only because our contemporary
ideology of pornography does not include the possibility of change, as if we were the
slaves of History and not its producers, as if sexual relations were not necessarily the
expression of social relations, as if sex itself was an external fact, as immutable as
time, which creates a human practice but it is never part of it".29
The rejection caused by the sexually explicit image hides the essentialist prejudice
that, deep down, reaffirms the unique form of desire, the form unidirectionally labeled
as masculine. As Linda Williams brilliantly analyzes, the limited pornographic
narrative merely denounces the impossibility of representing the desire of women
within the hegemonic system of visual pleasure: the “come shot” works, in the
pornographic image, as a metaphor of the expense, the “money shot”, and
demonstrates the impossible apprehension of the female pleasure in the Oedipal order,
the insufficiency of the eye and its need for the evidence of the visually proved
satisfied desire, for the seminal spillage, as a culmination of the sexual difference.
"The represented climax becomes a new figure of lack. This lack is nothing but a
perception based on the prior social and economic devaluation of women. The fetish
of the money shot typifies a solution offered by hard-core cinema to the perennial
masculine problem of understanding women difference. Another lesson, however, is
that such solutions remain laden with contradictions that are able to open possible
resistance routes to the hegemonic sexual pleasures.30
A dialectical reading of pornography31 or how to destroy the totalitarianism of the
29
Carter, Angela: “La mujer sadiana”. Edhasa. Barcelona, 1981 (págs. 11-12).
30
Williams, Linda: “Fetichismo y hard core: Marx, Freud y el ‘money shot’ “. Erreakzioa/Reacción , nº
9. Bilbao, 1999 (pág. 65).
31
In a recent paper on pornography and postmodern culture, the English Brian McNair
provides a classification of some of the pornography analysis strategies, distinguishing mainly
four:
a / The American behavioral studies, mainly Donnerstein and Linz, which defined
pornography as a form of traditional phallic dominance;
b / the social constructionism, inaugurated by M. Foucault, interested in demonstrating
the business cycle of the classification of images and texts considered as pornographic by the
power;
c / the ethnographic tradition of explicit analysis of the images, without historical
contextualization and regardless of their level of symbolic meaning (is the one used by
visual, specifying its fissures: the great fetishes of patriarchal capitalism, semen and
money, guarantees of the satisfaction of desire, problematized by the diffuse pleasure,
unidirectionally unrepresentable, of women.
Because if the body and the sexual practices are both historical products, the
pornography and the visual-textual relations that they establish so are, products
integrated in the capitalist system and its conjunctural traffic within the borders of the
socially visible and the in-visible (or only visible in privacy), of the erotic and the
pornographic, with the high benefits of the interested mobility of these limits: the
body (its exhibition, its visual exploitation) as a business or the transformation of
pleasure into profitability; pornography and advertising sharing the same market
strategies, the same teleological narrative frameworks that lead to de-swelling/the
expense (semen, money); sexual images of high and low intensity or the negotiable
border of the prohibitions. The paternalistic dynamics of censorship(s) and its
interests.
"Sex and work were, not long ago, fiercely opposed terms that today are both resolved
in the same type of demand. Formerly, the discourse of history took all its strength
from its violent opposition to the discourse of nature and the discourse of desire from
its opposition to the discourse of power, today they exchange their signifiers and their
fields of action. "32
The pornographic body, anti-artistic in its destruction, deeply conscious of its
materiality, becomes privileged metaphor of the fragmentation and the hyperreality of
the media spectacle, of the sex-simulation of postmodernity, excessively true to be
real, excessively obvious to provoke desire, images–instructions for the “desiring
machines”, objectified bodies, where the faces, in that slight moment of abandonment
produced by the orgasm, become the unique, the eminently obscene of the
representation, because the image of the ecstasy, of the abandonment, still disturbs us.
"All that is too real, too close to be true. And that is the fascinating point, the excess
of reality, the hyperreality of the thing. In porn, the only phantom at stake, if there is
any, is not sex, but the phantom of the real, and its absorption, absorption in another
thing different from the real, in the hyperreal. Porn voyeurism is not a sexual
voyeurism, but a voyeurism of representation and its loss, a vertigo of the scene loss
and the irruption of obscenity".33
MacKinnon and Dworkin to support the classification of their antipornographic bill for
Minneapolis) and
d / the recent implementation of poststructuralist textual analysis to sexually explicit
images, one of its best examples is Linda Williams.
See McNair, Brian: "Mediated Sex. Pornography & Postmodern Culture. "
Arnold Press. London, 1996.
32
Baudrillard, Jean: “Cultura y simulacro”. Kairós. Barcelona, 1998 (pág. 44).
33
Baudrillard, Jean: “De la seducción”. Cátedra. Madrid, 1994 (págs. 33-34).
Integrated, as all images, into a symbolic level of signification that we must
contextually interpret, the representation of the pornographic body, transactional,
alienated in productivity, could also be read as the epitome of the anticanonical,
antinormative, resistant body; the reverse of the tradition of nude in art, and because
of that, as a way of deaestheticization that sabotages the scopic pleasure through the
over-saturation, through the evidence, as a de-hierarchization strategy through the
destruction and its radical fracture with the representational limits of the public and
the private, the popular and the cult, the natural and the elaborated.
"As a category of “indecent” visual culture, pornography marks the changing borders
between the public (visibility, openness) and the private (invisibility, closure). If art
represents the public and legitimate display of the female body, pornography is the
“other”, that where the display of the body is illicit and confined to the marginal
spaces of public and private culture.34
The spied voyeur or how (the use of) pornography can become a political exercise:
the control displayed by Carolee Schneemann in the film “Fuses” (1967) over her
body and her sexual practices, the fragmentation of the discourse and the emergence
of dialogue and tenderness scenes between the protagonists (the artist herself and her
lover) over images of explicit sex, talk about a very different possibility, not only to
read pornography, but to produce it and use it, a well argued possibility, for example
by Paula Rabinowitz in her text about “Soft Fiction” (1979) by Chick Strand, 35 or
ironically demonstrated by the Mexican actress Maria Rojo in the film “La tarea”
(1990) by Jaime Humberto Hermosillo, where she becomes the protagonist of the
elaboration of a homemade porn film.
Neither aesthetic(static) bodies, nor addressed objectification, nor unidirectional
pleasure, but a perverse loop where the camera feeds the gaze of another camera
controlled by a woman.
The resignified/distanced gaze on dancing bodies merges with the hands, with the
lips, beyond the limited scopic universe.
Dance, dance, you damn... while I run through your skin in the dark.
Santiago de Compostela, November 1999.
34
35
Nead, Lynda: op. cit. (1998) (pág. 158).
See Rabinowitz, Paula: “ ‘Soft Fiction’. Cultura femenina, teoría feminista y cine etnográfico” in
Colaizzi, Giulia (ed.): “Feminismo y teoría fílmica”. Episteme. Valencia, 1995.