The Definition of Pornography: No Mystery
Oct 20th, 2008 by Micah Tillman | 4 Comments |
(You may recall that I once wrote a post entitled: “The Definition of Beauty: Mystery.”)
Why don’t we meet more zombies? Why do we encounter people as having minds and thoughts and personalities instead?
You can’t see their minds or thoughts or personalities, after all.
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What it means to experience another person is to experience her as something you can never fully experience. Quoth Husserl. (Levinas and Derrida followed.)
You can’t experience the parts of another person that make her another person.
But that’s why you experience her as another person.
If you could experience everything about another person, he wouldn’t be another person.
He’d be you.
Or else he’d be a mere object with no ideas, motives, or experiences.
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To experience another person, you have to experience her as mysterious (as having aspects to her being who and what she is that you can never actually encounter).
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That got me wondering if the difference between art and pornography is that art is beautiful and pornography isn’t.
Maybe art presents the mystery of the person pictured, while pornography doesn’t.
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Maybe the reason why Justice Stewart had to see something to know if it was pornography, was that it’s hard to say ahead of time what will make a person look beautiful (i.e., mysterious — personesque).
I haven’t figured this all out yet, though.
I just heard this very thing somewhere… but I can’t for the life of me remember where. Oh well. :) Hope ya’ll are doing well.
So what if there was a raunchy, kinky, degrading sex scene that also happened to present the mystery (and thus the beauty) of the people pictured? Is it possible for ‘art’ and ‘pornography’ to exist together?
“If you could experience everything about another person, he wouldn’t be another person.
He’d be you.”
But aren’t there ways in which others know us better than we know ourselves? And doesn’t this entail the idea that we might know others better than they know themselves?
That objection not withstanding, I think you’re on to something here.
I suspect that there might be some sort of overlap between the idea you’re suggesting here, the (Kantian?) idea that we shouldn’t use people as a means to an end but that we should recognize that they are an end to themselves, and the feminist critique about pornography-as-objectification.
Pornography treats its object as merely and only sexual. The “characters” whole being is exhausted by this fact: that they exist only for some one else’s pleasure. The mystery and fullness of them is denied.
Perhaps this is all connected to the fact that erotic art tends to leave things to the viewers imagination where as pornography blatantly and obviously spells it all out… Pornography operates on the premise that there is nothing more to the people than merely there sexual identities, erotica, on the other hand, hints at the mysery of the others.
Nice working definition, for sure. There are artists who can portray entirely naked subjects, fully detailed, without being sexual, errotic or particularly mysterious. Sally Mann comes to mind as a good example. Her work is beautiful but not always particularly mysterious. Maybe there is a different kind of beauty in knowing.