The most striking of all the many recent changes in the cultural climate has been the official acceptance, and even endorsement, of pornography. People are no longer able to articulate what is wrong with pornography or why it is at war with art. That which passes for art in the Rosenthal- Serota worldview is very often indistinguishable from pornography, and may owe its appeal to the same antinomian and destructive impulse. So what is wrong with pornography, and why is it never art?
The pornographic image is essentially de-personalizing; its function is to 'market' sexual gratification, by attaching it to an impersonal surrogate. The focus is on the sexual act and the sexual organs, detached from any personal relationship. In other words, pornography effects a shift in focus -a shift downwards from the human person, the object of love and desire, to the human animal, the object of transferable fantasies. As in the case of idolatry, the shift in focus is also a profanation. By focussing on the wrong things we pollute and diminish the right things. In pornography, desire is detached from love, and attached to the mute machinery of sex. This is as much a profanation of erotic love as dancing around a golden calf is a profanation of divine worship.
Fantasy replaces the real, resistant, objective world with a pliant surrogate. And it is important to see why this matters. Life in the actual world is difficult and embarrassing. Most of all is it difficult and embarrassing in our confrontation with other people who, by their very existence, make demands that we may be unwilling to meet. It requires a great force, a desire that fixes upon an individual, and sees that individual as unique and irreplaceable, if people are to make the sacrifices upon which the community depends for its longevity. It is far easier to take refuge in surrogates, which neither embarrass us nor resist our cravings. The habit grows of creating a compliant world of desire, in which the erotic force is dissipated and the needs of love denied.
Fantasies are private property, which I can dispose according to my will, with no answerability to the other. If they fill my mind in the act of love, then they constitute an abuse of the other, who has become the replaceable means to a self-regarding pleasure, rather than the object of an individualising desire. For the fantasist, therefore, the ideal partner is the rent-boy or the prostitute, whose purchasibility solves at once the moral problem presented by the existence of another person at the scene of sexual release. Being purchasable, the prostitute is exchangeable, and therefore not truly present in the moment of desire. She is the universal absence which fantasy fills with substitute goods.
The connection between pornography and prostitution is witnessed by etymology. The effect of pornographic fantasy is to 'commodify' the object of desire, and to replace love and its vestigial sacraments with the law of the market. This is the final disenchantment of the human world. When sex becomes a commodity, the most important sanctuary of human ideals becomes a market, and value is reduced to price. That is what has happened in the last few decades, and it is the root fact of post-modern culture.
Fantasies of violence have a similar function: they obliterate the human person, by enlarging the human body, until it fills the foreground of our thoughts. This too involves a malignant shift of focus, and this too is a profanation. By focussing on the tortured body, we degrade the embodied person. In both sex and death we confront the mystery of our incarnation; and the temptation is to shift our focus from the embodied soul to the disanimated body, from the irreplaceable source of value, to the repeatable routine.
Some things -the most important things -can be put on sale only if they are first profaned, voided of their sacramental character, and demoted from things of value to things with a price. The mechanism here involves a shift of focus, away from the realm of personal dignity to the biological facts which so easily degrade it. A comparable shift of focus occurs in sentimentality. And sentimentality plays a central role in post-modern culture -it is the mask with which fantasy conceals its cynical self -regard.
Sentimental feeling is easy to confuse with the real thing, for on the surface at least, they have the same object. The sentimental love of Judy and the real love of Judy are both directed towards Judy, and involve tender thoughts of which she is the subject. But this superficial similarity marks a deep difference. The real focus of my sentimental love is not Judy but me. For the sentimentalist it is not the object but the subject of emotion that is important. Real love focuses on the other: it is gladdened by his pleasure and grieved by his pain. The unreal love of the sentimentalist focuses on the self, and treats the pleasures and pains of its object only as an excuse for playing a role. The sentimentalist may seem to grieve at the other's sorrow, but he does not really grieve. For secretly he welcomes the sorrow that prompts his tears. It is another excuse for the noble gesture, another occasion to contemplate the image of a great-hearted self.
Sentimentality and fantasy go hand in hand. For the object of sentimental emotion is, like a fantasy object, deprived of objective reality, made pliant to a subjective need, and roughly discarded when the going gets tough. He is, from the beginning, only an excuse for an emotion whose focus lies elsewhere, in the great drama of which the sentimentalist is the sole enduring hero. Hence the object of sentimental love is given no security, and will find himself quickly replaced in his lover's affections when the script requires it. The sentimental lover of Judy pretends to acknowledge her value; but in fact he has assigned her a price.
Sentimentality, like fantasy, is at war with reality. It consumes our finite emotional energies in self-regarding ways and numbs us to the world of other people. It atrophies our sympathies, by guiding them into worn and easy channels, and so destroys not only our ability to feel, but also our ability to bring help where help is needed and to take risks on behalf of higher things. It may seem to project and endorse a vision of those higher things, to take on itself some of the ennobling function which is the imagination's proper task. But the appearance is an illusion. The object of sentimental emotion is in fact dragged down by the feeling which makes use of it, made grubby and tawdry in the game of emotional exchange. Sentimentality is another form of profanation. While pornography puts our lowest appetites on sale, sentimentality trades in love and virtue. But the effect is the same -to deprive these higher things of all reality, either by cynically denying them, or by making them insubstantial, dream-like, adrift in a never-never land where no human being can dwell. In the great works of imagination, by contrast, we are invited to enter a higher realm, in which real human motives and real human sentiments find their resolution and redemption. This higher realm is not a fantasy-product: it is not the surrogate object of base and existing desires. It is the true object of feelings which it itself engenders, and whereby it cleanses and sanctifies our lives.
Idolatry may have disappeared. But something very like it remains. Look at the grossest products of modern culture - Trainspotting and American Psycho, the music of Oasis or The Verve, the cult of Princess Diana, satellite pornography, and just about any teenage magazine -and you will see a frightening proliferation of demeaning surrogates, a 'doing dirt on life', as D.H. Lawrence described it. Popular culture is almost entirely devoted to the degradation of humanity, and one proof of this is that people who say so are regarded with incredulity -the same incredulity as the Israelites extended to Moses, when he ascended Mount Sinai to commune with his God.
Cover Drawing ROSE WYLIE
