A Portrait in Pornography

  Porn is so much more than a few teenage boys (of one age or another) ogling a couple of dirty images behind the bike sheds. It is rather an entire and very modern industry. An industry which has at its heart the taking of some external image, film or text, stripping out the context, as it strips off the clothes, and pitching the result at individuals. It then turns the real world of individuals and difficulty into a private fantasy where you are asked on seeing the image to forget that this is a real person, or a real occasion - what there are, we are told, is merely a visual opportunity, a piece of eye candy, for our own mind’s juices to work upon; an easily digestible figure for our fantasy, and one torn from context and time, and given over to us to play with as we want. The pornographic world is the world made then of readily accessible bite sized lumps of fantasy.

  As such it clearly takes on for the modern world, something of the traditional role of mythology. A myth was a similar provocation to a people who projected their desires upon the myth’s heroes and told their lives through them, and yet there was and is, this important difference. The myth was, by its nature, something to be shared. What appealed in them, was the mythological beyond oneself. This was what being a hero was all about. But porn is rather different. It is a mucky little guilty secret writ large. A place of private delight and fantasy. One might then, in one’s own little pornographic world, take images from the outside, but in the end it is all about oneself. In this world one is then a God or master - or at least lord in the fantasy kingdom, and that is the point.

  But this is not to say that the pornographic world does not allow a degree of socializing. On the contrary in a sense it is formed by it. It is just that that socializing is not defined on the level of the fantasy, so much as the stories that go before and after that fantasizing. One is then told (by one’s fellows) that it is ok to do porn (or that this porn is ok). Likewise after one has been stirred one shares the stirring with others - one talks about how it makes one lust, one agrees or disagrees in the lusting. One then arranges one’s feelings through the context of a peer pressure. And yet this peer pressure, this othering of the image does not effect one’s treatment or feeling of or for the image itself, as one looks onto it one lusts, and lusts badly, and cares not for who the image is about. All the socializing, and all the social pressure that surrounds this image is merely yet another provocation for this lusting.

  In a very real sense therefore what is disturbing about pornography is this very double series of abuses. As one looks at porn, one forgets the real lives one looks upon; but also as pornography is produced, one’s own desires are destroyed or at least forcefully absorbed within very stereotypical images. That is pornography fuses fairly primal lusts, and even more primal social pressure, to crush the multi-textured world of desire. Hence one’s lusts become rather encapsulated in a few mucky pictures, and a handful of rather boring and stereotypic images and nothing really more. One’s desire become then through pornography industrialized. Humanity’s ability to feel, and even their capacity to breed, become a factor within the industrial process, whose consumption can be easily predicted and catered for. To consume porn is to have one’s lusts strangely also consumed. At the base of porn is then a double devouring of the world and a powerful sedative drug. And yet of course this formula is one of the great formulas of today. It is everywhere operating with a silent power to render us predictable and en masse, even as we abuse our world. The rest of this essay will look at a number of examples from the last week.

  There is an image that recurs in the press once every few years - an image of a child, seemingly normal, but who we all know really, is a murderer. An image we then recognise instantly and gawp at. What we do next is probably a matter of taste and experience. Some of us feel slight pity and the idiocy of adult’s responses to the callousness of ten year olds (who are not brilliant at computing odds). Others though, stop and linger at the portrait. It appears to represent everything wrong with their world. All the silent disruptive forces, and hidden evils that make life so tricky, and so perilous are caught in this image. Here is a child who murdered another child; what could be more blighted than this double abuse of innocence? they wonder. Here then is an image of pure evil – or at least of man’s purely ‘fallen’ nature. The image then becomes a figurine for hate. A hate that is all the deeper as the image cannot be updated. The individual involved has since been given a new identity, and so all that exists is the picture frozen in time of a ten year old. They might have moved on, but the conditions that allowed them to, actually stops those who beat themselves up over the case from ever actually moving on. For them this ten year old is always a figure of evil.

  One ends up then with the oddest of double-thinks. An image from fifteen years ago of a kid, becomes a focus for hatred, and howls of embitterment. Why, we are asked by admittedly some of the more disadvantaged in society, why was this person, this child now grown up, treated specially? Why is more money spent upon him and not us? Why is his life protected, while our life is ruined? The point here of course is that to those outside the pornographic loop these questions are self-answering. It is because of the mob that the individual is treated differently. But of course the mob itself, locked in its own fantasy, in its own pornography, cannot get that far. They see only their own black dream. More than that they cannot of course see how that fantasy warps everything. It is no wonder then that the individual involved has been linked himself to child porn. In a very real sense he is the victim of child porn on the grossest and most extreme of levels. His childhood was destroyed, partly by his own action, but mostly by adults who insisted that those actions were the actions of an adult (and did so for their own reasons). Adulthood was then thrust upon him in a way that the most obnoxious of paedophiles would recognise; the claim in both cases is that a child can be judged as an adult. A claim it appears that this mob event never can abandon or leave behind.

  On a slightly wider point, it is very clear that the up and coming election campaign is going to come down to images. What else is a head to head by our political leaders than one long series of fantasy images? We will be asked to look upon these porn stars and project onto them our own fantasies and dreams (this time of how the country should be governed). They will all be saying then to us, ‘look at us’ and make of us what you will, use us in your fantasy for a better life, but vote for us. This is a claim that the media will then play up to. Reporting on personality is both easier for your average hack than actually getting a good story; but also has the advantage of increasing the influence of the media. The media will be then our pimps, keeping our minds well stocked with memorable phrases and fantasies upon which we will then be encouraged to ‘make a choice’. The entire debate then slips away from any real world. It becomes rather about a collective fantasy for the future. A sequence of dreams and idiocies and nothing actually beyond them.

  In such a world, the media of course have lot of power, there is a clear subtle game played by the visually literate copyeditors of newspapers and websites. They like to choose images to illustrate points. They will then create as it were a running commentary in pictures of whatever fantasies are going around. We have seen then pictures pf Gordon Brown looking shifty (when he has been caught out being shifty), or looking like a bully; while Cameron often looks smug or like an oik or merely a fool. Or again Griffin’s picture (they use the same one) looks every inch the racist buffoon. The point here is a real one, the images are clearly being used to enforce the story – to give a great punch. More than that as they have a visual power over the mind, they provide a focus for the story. One reads it and says ‘yes, you can see that in their face’. Once one makes that move, the story becomes so much more real, it becomes a factor in one’s judgement. A fact that one then uses to build the fantasy upon which one makes one’s own judgments about this person’s ‘nature’, This move is of course a genuine fantasy, as we do not know the person. All we have is the complex quasi-pornographic image we are given. That is a moment torn out of a context and projected into another (that is used to illustrate stories which they may or may not represent), and our reactions to this fantasy. We have nothing more than that, nothing more real than this pornography of the spirit.

  On a different (but linked) point, the only way politicians can prove that they care in this fantasy world is though issues. One needs then as a politician, to choose one’s issues carefully – for on them one will be judged; and here of course is the rub: One is not judged on what one has done, or would do, so much as the intent to do something. Opposition therefore tends to merely point out how things are naff for certain people and places, and then make claims about doing something (Britain’s influence in the world will be returned to us, by the Tories, apparently). Governments will then pick on this or that case study proving that their policies work, or at least sometimes are not utterly rubbish. But in either case there is no real attempt to engage with all the factors involved in these successes or failures. On the contrary, they are torn out of all context for our delight. They are presented then as bite sized pieces for us to build up or knock down in our collective fantasizing.

  But behind this policy there is a deeper case of pornography. One of the problems of modernity is that it makes power rather uneven. At each and every point governments feel their power corroded. They design then computer systems, networks for the NHS for example, which are meant to be state of the art, only to have the technology change, and their system look idiotically pedestrian and expensive, in comparison to the one readily (and freely) available to us all. Government has then a problem (as do all decision-making large organizations, that take time and employ large numbers of people). Once a project has been started, it is so difficult to stop. More than that, there is a real inertia about ever trying to stop it. Managers like moving on. They and the contract and are done with the whole thing. They wash their hands of it. No matter that the world really does not allow any CEO this luxury anymore. The world changes too quickly for that. The solutions (real or merely handwashing) of yesterday slip very quickly into obsolescence.

  The result is that government (but also over large companies) have proved rather bad at operating in a world where an awful lot of stuff is done via websites. Government websites are often unhelpful and unuseful while their communication networks are never very good even when they are finished (the government pays through the nose for services which the population we get for free). The result is something rather worrying. For governments feel their lack of power, and feel it very hard. They feel their failure to govern. And yet this failure then quickly slips from being their problem to being ours. After all the government reasons, as they govern, they represent us, so it is beholden upon them to allow themselves the powers to resist this erosion of their influence, through whatever means they can. They will then invent laws to police and regulate or limit what individuals do, in order to make their own job of governing so much easier. Terrorist laws become then used in a variety of contexts, and ways, all to ensure the government does not look so bad.

  More than that, a government that feels its powers slipping is genuinely dangerous. For it slips into a disjunction where it starts to fantasise that endless other (i.e. non-Western or Non-American governments, or the poor) powers are out to get it. But it feels then that its ability to influence and to effect the world is slipping. And entering into this fantasy, it takes ‘protective’ measures. We then get a world dictated by the needs of America to keep its end up (and tag-along Britain too) in the face of a perceived dilation of power. It does whatever it takes to do so. More than that, governments who have felt their power eroded by technology are likely to look to it for foolish answers to their problems. One of the deep things that was going on in the Iraq War was the destruction of the faith of neo-cons in technology. They thought they could wage a war on the cheap, and win it in gadgets. They did not bother then about the hearts and minds, with bloody consequences (the war only ended when the policy returned to the old heart and mind, or bribe the enemy policies of yesteryear). Governments then are likely to attempt to develop ‘government’ technology to police people (police operated drones are on their way)… That is they are in a future-fantasy where government is under threat and are taking precautions now to stop their gradual erosion. The problem of course is that being government, their solutions are always and at all times governmental: that is they are about designing gadgets to increase their powers of command, and are never about the people themselves. Government's quasi-pornographic fantasy, is worryingly close to becoming our reality.

  Pornography, that is the stripping of an image of a thing from the world from its context and the projection of one’s own personal (and dark) fantasies upon than image, is fast becoming a great power in the land. It precludes real debate or discussion, devours democracy, bewitches the media and government, and inverts many of the relations of victim and victimized. The problem that we are surely facing is - can still we resist? Can we resist the pornographic already ingrained into our souls? Let us hope so. Let us at least try…