pomegranates | "Crash" and Pornography Culture

Technology: the purveyor of pornography
     Pornography, literally, the writing of harlots, is a term these days often invoked. Video and the democratization of its technology beginning in the late 1960s brought inexpensive production, albeit with the shoddy production values of early video. The popularization of the videocassette recorder in the 1970s in combination with the convenience of neighborhood video stores ensured great accessibility, and privacy. In the late 1970s and 1980s cable TV spawned a variety of "pay-per-view" options to view pornography without leaving home at all. During this period, too, there came the innovation of the non-professional porn flick — couples who would videotape and sell their own oftentimes scripted sexual liaisons. Private intimacies became pornographies for public consumption. Also popularized was the recordation of one's own sex acts for later private consumption. The remembrance of one's arousal is arousing. In this way the VCR enabled a kind of sexual shape-shifting: from subject to object, and back to subject again. Such permutations were eloquently described in Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan's film Family Viewing.[6] And on the Internet, the realm of the one-handed typist, the ease with which pornography may be distributed has increased yet again.
     The result of these technological developments has been an increasing awareness of pornography as an aspect, even a force, in culture. For conservative feminists and the religious right, pornography is the theory, the rape and murder of women the practice. For queer culture, the production of their own pornographies can be a self-affirming form of representation in a straight culture where a "lesbian kiss" on TV is so unheard of as to be a matter of public debate. It is desirable that one's sexuality be represented. And in the age of AIDS, even in the porn industry where so many "stars" have died, the well-endowed porn star who possesses a longevity both on and off the screen is elevated to cult status within the pages of Manshots and Unzipped, "fanzines" of gay porn stars charting their bodies of work, their lives, and their deaths. In other media, feature stories explore the lives and motivations of women who make a living dancing and working in the sex trades, and many twenty- and thirtysomethings know women and men who've gone to make a killing working as "hostesses" in the Japanese bars often run by the Yakuza. The Internet becomes a censored territory because of the ease with which pornography or somehow unacceptable images and ideas can be transmitted. The development of software to limit access to "unacceptable" sites demonstrates the American confusion over what is and is not pornography since such software may prohibit the viewing of sites based on the presence of nudity alone.
     It is appropriate that the pornographic sensibility lives so well in cyberspace: a place of dislocated bodies, private spaces and personal computers operated by the one-handed typist, multiple and projected identities. Here the Internet not only enhances this dislocation, it caters to its results.
     On the Web, the porn site is ubiquitous, a common complaint on some listservs is how to avoid being spammed with invitations to visit such cyberspace outposts. It is said that best way to make money on the Web is to build a porn site. In Seattle's closely-knit high-tech community, it's not uncommon to know or hear of someone who is making big bucks on a porn site. I've worked at computers in Internet cafes where the person next to me was developing one It's not difficult — there are enough erotic and porno stock photography collections so that their copyright infringement is a recurrent problem in the world of internet pornography and sites are frequently shut down for this reason. Several prominent adult sites in the Seattle area commonly advertise in local newspapers for their employees; I unwittingly showed up for an interview to contract with a company which turned out to not only be a major porn site (complete with 3D porn cartoons and "live" simulated sex shows, which with a lack of seamless delivery over a 28.8 modem must provide for a rather unsatisfying progression towards denouement at the jerky rate of often no more than one to seven frames per second), but a live sex and strip video supplier as well as an outsource agency building porn sites for others. It may be that with its increasing financial potency pornography will come to represent the American Dream of the next millennium, perhaps its distributors will market a "software" more lucrative than Windows '95 and the number of porno and soft-core household names will increase beyond Hugh Hefner, Larry Flynt, and Linda Lovelace (Linda Marchiano).
     Yet, with the exception of the pornographies of gay, lesbian and other societal groups commonly denied representation, these pornographies are by and large devoid of much political significance — in many ways they are just another diversion for the masses, a form capable of quelling social dissent because the one-handed typist is focused on him or herself. Perhaps, along with Xanax, Prozac, TV, and a slew of other tranquilizers, most pornographies are less a threat to society than another "opiate" to quell the masses. Pornography, stripped of its potentially radicalizing nature, these days signifies little more than consumption — it's just another form of "retail therapy, after all. Pornography becomes little more than style, co-opted by mainstream society and the vehicles of consumption in much the same way that S/M images were popularized in the last ten years. At Urban Outfitters, a trendy clothing and home furnishing store, one can purchase a t-shirt brand-named "porn star" which bears its logo on its front, sometimes prefaced with the words, "I am a [porn star]." Wearing such a t-shirt is perhaps less subversive than it might seem.
     Indeed, pornography is such a prevalent aesthetic in culture that numerous artists have appropriated pornographic images and film and video clips, manipulating and distorting their aesthetics in a subversive manner generally reserved for signifiers of the dominant paradigm. San Francisco-based found-footage filmmaker Craig Baldwin exploited and subverted such footage in Skin Flick, a product of his living for a time in a projectionist booth above a porn theatre.
     J.G. Ballard intended Crash to be pornographic and wrote in the preface to the French edition of Crash, "…I would still like to think that Crash! is the first pornographic novel based on technology."[7] But unlike the pornography of capitalist consumer culture, this pornography was to be an assault as much on the underpinnings of capitalist techo-culture as it was an assault on the human body. Ballard elaborated on his goals: "In a sense, pornography is the most political form of fiction, dealing with how we use and exploit each other in the most urgent and ruthless way." In Crash, the subversive mixings of the geometries of the car with desire, blood and gism would harken back to a different pornographic tradition.

Notes

6. In Egoyan's Family Viewing, a young man discovers that his father, in the video equipment business, has been taping over videos of his childhood with the mother who escaped the family because of the unwanted bondage-and-domination play.

7. J.G. Ballard, as quoted from the preface to the French edition of Crash in Re/Search No. 8/9, ed. V. Vale and Andrea Juno. San Francisco: Re/Search Publications (1984), p. 98