pomegranates | "Crash" and Pornography Culture

The cultural origins of pornography
     French philosopher Rene Descartes' ontology of mind/body dualism outlined in his 1633 work De homine set the stage for the appearance of pornography, a vehicle specifically intended to arouse the bodies of its audience through stimulating the mind. With the intellectualization of sex originating in the 1600s came the invention of sex aids. Italy took the lead in this industry and Italian dildos and condoms became available in London during the 1600s.[8] By the 1680s, Les Academie des Dames and L'Ecole des filles, recognized as two classics of the form, were available to largely privileged upper-class gentlemen.
     From its origination, pornography was inextricably linked to the development of the novel (DeSade's Justine, Fanny Hill) and technologies of dissemination. But early pornography was also inherently political, a provocative strategy of political sedition and cultural subversion. The French Revolution is a exemplary of this usage, DeSade an eager participant in the overthrow. Lynn Hunt writes in her essay, Pornography and the French Revolution: "Politically motivated pornography helped to bring about the revolution by undermining the legitimacy of the ancien regime as a social and political system."[9] It is difficult to say if in condemning the confrontational art and performance of cultural provocateurs Andres Serrano and Karen Finley the fact that such art might give impetus to a radical altering of socio-cultural realities was a point heeded or lost upon detractors such as Senator Jessie Helms in their raging against the National Endowment of the Arts for bestowing grants upon such artists. Despite Supreme Court protections on socially critical and provocative works, the validity of such challenges to the status quo seems to have been lost in these days of blanket condemnation of confrontational art. Examples include photographer Andres Serrano's Piss Christ, the much-maligned representation of a cross standing in a jar of urine; and the chilling monologues of the sometimes nude, glitter-bespeckled and raw egg-slimed performance artist Karen Finley on child abuse and violence against women.
     Despite pornography's pivotal role in agitating for social change, it was not until 1857 that it was defined in the Oxford English Dictionary, then only described as the "writing of harlots." Pornography was not recognized as a form separate from the novel until advances in print technology threatened to increase its availability. The genre of pornography was created to shunt off from literature that which, from the view of the upper classes, might be a danger to the masses. Before advances in printing technology, pornography was enjoyed by the upper classes alone. As advances in print technology made possible the dissemination of these pleasure books to a wider audience, shunting them off to the sidelines was the first step began their regulation and hence, the suppression of dissent and control of pleasure.
     Capitalist consumer culture has denuded pornography of much of its subversive meanings, rendering it little more than a means of displacing desires which have no satisfactory aim. In examining its 20th century function Susan Sontag elaborated in The Pornographic Imagination,

Most pornography… points to …. the traumatic failure of modern capitalist society to provide authentic outlets for the perrenial human flair for high-temperature visionary obsessions, to satisfy the appetite for exulted self-transcending modes of concentration and seriousness. The need of human beings to transcend "the personal" is no less profound than the need to be a person, an individual. But this society serves that need poorly.[10]

If this is true, then perhaps with the advent of 20th century pornography culture, this failure looms even larger.
Science fiction, however, has represented a great source of "high-temperature visionary obsessions" in the modern and postmodern eras. Likening science fiction to pornography in aspiration, Sontag asserted that it engenders disorientation and "psychic dislocation."[11] Perhaps it is not surprising that writers such as J.G. Ballard have combined the two forms towards the creation of new utopias, dystopias, and emblems of cataclysm culture. In Crash, however, it is this transcendence that is the goal of the coarsely sexual and intimidating Vaughan who instructs protagonist James Ballard:

…the car crash is a fertilizing rather than a destructive event — a liberation of sexual energy that mediates the sexuality of those who have died with an intensity impossible in any other form. To fully understand that, and to live that… that is my project.[12]

It is also this desire to transcend the isolation of the personal in modernity which leads to our adulation of the "star" who becomes larger than life. In Crash the star is fixed in time, saved from the ignominy of age, and immortalized as transcendent symbol by his or her violent fusion with the automobile. As Salon writer Andrew Ross ruminated in a discussion with Camille Paglia: "Perhaps [Princess] Diana did us all a favor by dying when she did, at 36, with her beautiful image frozen in our minds, before she got older and went even further downhill."[13]
According to Steven Marcus, pornography strives "…toward the elimination of external or social reality." Crash conforms readily to this project, wherein the frames of the film-strip chart the duration of "the repetition of sexual encounters [and bodies] reduced to sexual parts and to the endless possibilities of their variation and combination."[14]
This subsuming of the pornographic into the genre of science fiction is common, representing a reclaiming of pornography as a device of cultural criticism and subversion from a capitalist culture hungry to appropriate renegade expressions. As well as being seen in Ballard's work, there is a subculture of so-called slash fiction, that subversive subgenre explored and circulated by Trekie fans and writers wherein Captain Kirk and Spock are eroticized and depicted in the various poses of a decidedly homosexual ardor.[15]

Notes

8. Hunt, Lynn, The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500-1800, ed. Lynn Hunt. New York: Zone Books (1993), p.30)

9. Hunt, Lynn, "Pornography and the French Revolution," in The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500-1800, ed. Lynn Hunt. New York: Zone Books (1993) p. 301.

10. Sontag, Susan, "The Pornographic Imagination," in Styles of Radical Will, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (1969), p.70.

11. Ibid, p.47.

12. Cronenberg, David, Crash. London: Faber and Faber Limited (1996), p.42.

13. Ross, Andrew, They Destroyed Her, in Salon Magazine, September 2, 1997)

14. Hunt, Lynn, The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500-1800, ed. Lynn Hunt. New York: Zone Books (1993), p.39.

15. "It has been argued that science fiction, seemingly the most sexless of genres, is in fact engrossed with questions of sexual difference and sexual relations, which it repeatedly addresses alongside questions of other kinds of differences and relations: humans and aliens, humans and machines, time travelers and those they visit, and so on." NASA/TREK: Popular Science and Sex in America, by Constance Penley, NY: Verso (1997), p.103.