3 - The Pornographic Logic of Global Capitalism: Dead Europe

Summary

That pornography exemplifies the processes of commodification is a truism. What distinguishes it from other manifestations of commodity culture is that it also stands at the outer edge of what our society is prepared to accept in the name of the commodity. For this reason it is internal to the liberal-capitalist order but also appears as a limit case that tests the boundaries of its tolerance. It is the “obscene underside” of the economic relations most of us take for granted. In The Metastases of Enjoyment, Slavoj Žižek uses this phrase, “obscene underside,” in a wide-ranging discussion of the paradoxes of communal identity. He argues that, via the conduit of what he calls “solidarity-in-guilt,” the foundation of community consists in practices that transgress the (moral) law that also regulates community. Žižek finds this process in the carnivalesque inversions of traditional patriarchal societies. As the “public Law” casts off its “patriarchal dress” and assumes a “neutral-egalitarian” character, however, inversion becomes bound up with the rehearsal of an apparently disavowed authoritarianism. “What now erupts in the carnivalesque suspension of the ‘egalitarian’ public Law,” he writes, “is precisely the authoritarian-patriarchal logic that continues to determine our attitudes, although its direct public expression is no longer permitted. ‘Carnival’ thus becomes the outlet for the repressed social jouissance: Jew-baiting riots, gang-rapes …” The use of a word like “erupts” in this context seems to localize these expressions of “repressed social jouissance”; it gives them the character of occasions or events (riots, rapes) that punctuate the everyday, but do not really belong to it. In a consumer society increasingly mediated by constant access to the Internet, this sense of eruption belies the ways in which repressed jouissance secretes through very banal, and seemingly perpetual, acts of consumption. The fact that violent pornography is only a screen or a mouse click away for most consumers in the West effectively normalizes it, rendering it entirely unexceptional, without attenuating the sense in which it violates communal notions of propriety. It is as if the contradictions of the social order have been regularized and genuinely democratized.