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Invisibledoolhoofd
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Reged: 12/22/22
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Stereo-Porno: Baudrillard's musings on Pornography and Hyper-Realism
      05/21/23 03:22 PM

A bewildering, claustrophobic and obscene image: that of Japanese quadraphonics. An ideally conditioned room - fantastic technique! - music in four dimensions; not just the three of the environing space, but also a fourth, visceral dimension of internal space. The technical delirium of the perfect restitution of music (Bach, Monteverdi, Mozart!) that has never existed, that no one has ever heard, and that was not meant to be heard like this. Moreover, one does not "hear" it, for the distance that allows one to hear music, at a concert or anywhere else, is abolished. Instead it permeates one from all sides; there is no longer any musical space; it is the simulation of a total environment that dispossesses one of even the minimal analytic perception constitutive of music's charm. The Japanese have simple-mindedly, and in complete good faith, confused the real with the greatest number of dimensions possible. If they could construct hexaphonics, they would do it.

Now, it is by this fourth dimension which they have added to music, that they castrate you of all musical pleasure. Something else fascinates (but no longer seduces) you: technical perfection - "high fidelity" - which is just as obsessive and puritanical as the other, conjugal fidelity. This time, however, one no longer even knows what object it is faithful to, for no one knows where the real begins or ends, nor understands, therefore, the fever of perfectibility that persists in the real's reproduction. Technique, in this sense, digs its own grave. For at the same time that it perfects the means of synthesis, it deepens the criteria of analysis and definition to such an extent that total faithfulness, total exhaustiveness as regards the real becomes forever impossible. The real becomes a vertiginous fantasy of exactitude lost in the infinitesimal. In comparison with, for example, the trompe-l'oeil, which saves on one dimension, "normal" three-dimensional space is already debased and impoverished by virtue of an excess of means (all that is real, or wants to be real, constitutes a debasement of this type). Quadraphonics, hyperstereo and hi-fi constitute a conclusive debasement.

Pornography is the quadraphonics of sex. It adds a third and fourth track to the sexual act. It is the hallucination of detail that rules. Science has already habituated us to this microscopics, to this excess of the real in its microscopic detail, to this voyeurism of exactitude (a close-up of the invisible structures of the cell, etc.) - to this notion of an inexorable truth that can no longer be measured with reference to the play of appearances and that can only be revealed by a sophisticated technical apparatus. End of the secret.

What else does pornography do, in its sham vision, than reveal the inexorable, microscopic truth of sex? It is directly descended from a metaphysics that supposes the fantasy of a hidden truth and its revelation, the fantasy of "repressed" energy and its production - on the obscene scene of the real. Thus, the impasse of enlightened thought when asked, should one censure pornography and choose a well-tempered repression? There can be no definitive response in the affirmative, for pornography has reason on its side; it is part of the devastation of the real, of the insane illusion of the real and its objective "liberation." One cannot liberate the productive forces without wanting to "liberate" sex in its brute function; they are both equally obscene. The realist corruption of sex, the productivist corruption of labor - same symptoms, same combat.

The equivalent of the conveyor belt here is the Japanese vaginal cyclorama - it outdoes any strip-tease. Prostitutes, their thighs open, sitting on the edge of a platform, Japanese workers in their shirt-sleeves (it is a popular spectacle), permitted to shove their noses up to their eyeballs within the woman's vagina, in order to see, to see better - but what? They clamber over each other in order to gain access, and all the while the prostitutes speak to them gently, or rebuke them sharply for the sake of form. The rest of the spectacle, the flagellations, the reciprocal masturbation and traditional strip-tease, pales before this moment of absolute obscenity, this moment of visual voracity that goes far beyond sexual possession. A sublime pornography: if they could do it, these guys would be swallowed up whole within the prostitute. An exaltation with death? Perhaps, but at the same time they are comparing and commenting on the respective vaginas in mortal seriousness, without ever smiling or breaking out in laughter, and without ever trying to touch. No lewdness, but an extremely serious, infantile act borne of an undivided fascination with the mirror of the female organ, like Narcissus' fascination with his own image.

Beyond the conventional idealism of the strip-tease (perhaps there might even be some seduction here), pornography at its most sublime reverses itself into a purified obscenity, an obscenity that is purer, deeper, more visceral. But why stop with nudity, or the genitalia? If the obscene is a matter of representation and not of sex, it must explore the very interior of the body and the viscera. Who knows what profound pleasure is to be found in the visual dismemberment of mucous membranes and smooth muscles? Our pornography still retains a restricted definition. Obscenity has an unlimited future. But take heed, it is not a matter of the deepening of a drive; what is involved is an orgy of realism, an orgy of production. A rage (perhaps also a drive, but one that substitutes itself for all the others) to summon everything before the jurisdiction of signs. Let everything be rendered in the light of the sign, in the light of a visible energy. Let all speech be liberated and proclaim desire. We are reveling in this liberalization, which, in fact, simply marks the growing progress of obscenity.

But is not the sexual itself already a forced materialization? Is not the advent of sexuality already part of occidental realistics, the compulsion proper to our culture to instantiate and instrumentalize everything? Sexual gratification is truly the industrial usufruct of the body, and the opposite of all seduction: it is a product of extraction, a technological product of a machinery of bodies, a logistics of pleasure which goes straight to its objective, only to find its object dead. The more one advances willy-nilly in sex's veracity, in the exposure of its workings, the more immersed one becomes in the accumulation of signs, and the more enclosed one becomes in the endless over-signification of a real that no longer exists, and of a body that never existed. All that is hidden and still enjoys a forbidden status will be unearthed, rendered to speech and made to bow before the facts. The real is growing ever larger, some day the entire universe will be real, and when the real is universal, there will be death.

From the discourse of labor to the discourse of sex, from the discourse of productive forces to that of drives, one finds the same ultimatum: that of production in the literal sense of the word. Its original meaning, in fact - pro-ducere - was not to fabricate, but to render visible or to make appear. Sex is produced like one produces a document, or as one says of an actor that he produces himself on stage. To produce is to materialize by force what belongs to another order, that of the secret and of seduction. Seduction is, at all times and in all places, opposed to production. Seduction removes something from the order of the visible, while production constructs everything in full view, be it an object, a number or a concept.

Everything is to be produced, everything is to be legible, everything is to become real, visible and accountable; everything is to be transcribed in relations of force, systems of concepts or measurable energy; everything is to be said, accumulated, indexed and recorded. This is sex as it exists in pornography, but, more generally, this is the enterprise of our entire culture, whose natural condition is obscene: a culture of monstration, of demonstration, of productive monstrosity.

Modern unreality no longer implies the imaginary, it engages more reference, more truth, more exactitude - it consists in having everything pass into the absolute evidence of the real. As in hyperrealist paintings (the paintings of the "magic realists") where one can discern the grain of the face's skin, an unwonted microscopics that lacks even the charm of the uncanny.

Hyperrealism is not surrealism, it is a vision that hunts down seduction by means of visibility. They "give you more." This is already true of color in film or television. They give you so much - color, lustre, sex, all in high fidelity, and with all the accents ("that's life!") - that you have nothing to add, that is to say, nothing to give in exchange. Absolute repression: by giving you a little too much, they take away everything.

Taken from Seduction by Jean Baudrillard
Free full .pdf:
https://monoskop.org/images/9/96/Baudrillard_Jean_Seduction.pdf



Art: Inferi by Ravnheart a.k.a. Gina Pitkänen

--------------------
Penny: 'What are you and Professor FussyFace up to tonight?'
Leonard: "Star Wars on Blu-ray."
Penny: 'Haven't you seen that movie like, a thousand times?'
Leonard: "Not on Blu-ray. Only twice on Blu-ray."
Penny: 'Oh, Leonard...'
Leonard: "I know. It's high-resolution sadness."
- The Big Bang Theory, S07E09

Post Extras Print Post Remind Me! Notify Moderator
. * * Re: Stereo-Porno: Baudrillard's musings on Pornography and Hyper-Realism syncro   05/22/23 07:45 AM
. * * Re: Stereo-Porno: Baudrillard's musings on Pornography and Hyper-Realism doolhoofd   01/08/24 06:09 PM


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