'[s]aturated by a culture in which one gender is a trussed-up, passive sex toy for the other. But this is exactly what we're doing with the rest of our public space. It's not the existence of porn that bothers me, but its colonisation of the mainstream, ...'
---Zoe Williams.
I know some will pass this off as simply being middle-age prudery or even muslim conservatism on my part but I think that's really a cop out. The incredible allure of the image. I don't think anyone can deny the appeal of some of the more provocative ones, whether one wants to call it instinctive or natural or culturally learned) Of course, other images are just cheap or comical and even staged as a 'bit of a laugh for the lads'. But there's also something insidious going on here. Related to this general acceptance into the mainstream is a deep scepticism towards anyone who even suggests there should be limits (as usual, this is seen as an infringement on one's freedom, etc....but what about the idea of self-imposed limits?)
Ivan Illich and the reticence of the eye. So much of this is really a religious training: to speak considerately, to lower one's eyes, listen carefully. In late capitalism does the idea of a boundary even make any sense? Everything must flow, nothing is sacred or permanent.
Saturation is the key word here. This is not about the initial high associated with transgression. 'Saturation' implies that the shock of the new (in art or in advertising or in books and films..all amounts to the same thing, really) doesn't shock any more. It's shocking that anyone is actually shocked in this day and age.Think of the exponential growth in the availability of music and films, the sheer volume of babble and conversation in blogland, the infinite growth in the number of research papers, books, reviews, derivatives of derivatives. The very word 'excess' seems almost antiquated, as does the word restraint. 'I want it, therefore I must have it.'
Availability. That's what it's really about, isn't it? A fantasy island in which nothing is denied you. A kind of free-floating Utopia, an endless summer's day of perfect light, Matisse's swimmers, the body stripped of its guilt. Abandonment. A sort of blindness because it entails not looking at the world as it really is, but escaping into a realm of unreality and fabrication, a palace of dreams.
J.B. on pleasures and palaces:
(really should relate this to E. Bloch, daydreaming...)
'If there is one word which can safely be applied to almost all the constructions for entertainment it is the adjective impermanent....The architecture of entertainment, of fairs, exhibitions, concert halls, and theatres may be considered alongside church buildings. Like churches places of entertainment are where people go for short spells only...But the difference is this. Churches are built to last...Nothing is more empty than a deserted fairground...but an empty church is full. ...
Fairs and entertainments are the cast-offs of the church. Their ancestors were hurled out of the church...And I wish that this people's art would come back to churches-a little more vulgarity of painted wood,..a little more of the fairground.
In Italy and Spain fair and church, entertainment and worship, are undivided...The Puritan sense of sin about pleasure means that we drive it out into the open fields of the world.'
This last point indicates a double meaning of the word 'contain'. As long as religious institutions encompassed the whole of reality, even making space for the less praiseworthy aspects of human nature, they were able to restrict/contain them to some extent. One wonders whether Guenon and Eliade were right: carnivals themselves were either sanctioned or tacitly allowed by religion. And didn't Dario Fo once make a similar point?
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