The Erotic Logic of Pornutopia

Pornotopia emerges from the regimes of profit and pleasure. The pornographic state depends on a critical symbiosis of advanced capitalism, mass commercialism, electronic technology, and unbridled entertainment. ²⁰ Clearly, sex appeals and sex sells. Pornography, whether the "vanilla" erotica of cable TV or the seedy hard­core video, commodifies sex. While our society prohibits the sale of sex, we are much more tolerant about the sale of the image of sex. We forbid the sale of men and women, but often allow the sale of their sex divorced from their persons. Basically, pornography tracks the modern mass advertising process: pornography takes an individual's sex, imagistically transforms and packages it, and sends it out for commercial sale in a mass market. Like commodification generally, pornography trades the essence of the person for a money­making image. The pornographic state is a republic erupting with images­­images that promise to make the unattainable attainable. It is a domain where "uninhibited, robust, and wide­open" ²¹ fantasies dominate.

Within this fantasy realm, private passion all too easily replaces public reason as the key rationale for constitutional protection of expression. Pornotopia must disregard or disbelieve Justice Felix Frankfurter's admonition: "It must never be forgotten ... that the Bill of Rights was the child of the Enlightenment [and that behind] the guarantee of free speech lay faith in the power of ... reason...." ²² Frankfurter's plea for reasoned discourse will fall on deaf ears. Madison's Enlightenment logic, which elevates the linear rationality of the printed word, will give way to pornotopia's erotic logic, which exalts the chaos of the electronic image.

Indeed, the erotic logic of the pornographic state becomes an "anti­logic," a system of contradictions. The power of pornography derives, in part, from its phantasmagoria­­its shifting series of images are both there and not there, both real and not real. As Susan Keller suggests, "[i]t may be the combination of feeling real and not being real that makes the pornographic representation 'work' ... by successfully imitating and not being at the same time." ²³ This phantom­like quality of pornography begets yet other contradictions. Viewers of pornography engage in voyeuristic and exhibitionistic experiences that both include and exclude them, and that never disappoint but often frustrate them. Media theorist Annette Kuhn summarizes well these oppositions: "While luring the spectator with the promise of visual pleasure, pornography in the final instance excludes him from the action. Frustrating though this may be ... a lack of closure opens up a space ... where he is free to complete the action as he pleases, in his own imagination." ²⁴ At its extreme, pornography legitimates logical contradictions in the viewer's conscious desires. For example, the "fantasy of rape" ²⁵ ­­in which the victim resists seduction, is forcibly overpowered, but nevertheless finds sexual satisfaction­­"may involve wishes and positions which, logically, cancel each other out­­the wish to have something and not to have it." ²⁶ In all of its modes­­reality but unreality, inclusion but exclusion, fulfillment but frustration, anxiety but pleasure­­pornography's erotic logic stimulates the old mind of the First Amendment in new ways. Concentration is protected to guarantee masturbation.

As erotic logic overtakes the traditional First Amendment, a liberal justification for constitutional protection­­the promotion of individual self­ realization­­becomes increasingly indistinguishable from pornotopia's promotion of individual self­gratification. ²⁷ Jerome Barron and C. Thomas Dienes intimate as much when they observe: "If one accepts the liberty model of speech, it can be argued that even obscene material can aid in self­awareness and self­development." ²⁸ Indeed, becoming more self­aware of pornographic desires impels one to develop them further. The Delphic injunction of the Madisonian free speech guarantee is "know thyself"; the Dionysian maxim of the pornotopian First Amendment is "feel thyself." The primary appeal of self­ realization in deliberative democracy is to master oneself; the "primal appeal" ²⁹ of self­gratification in the pornographic state is "to lose one's self, lose it utterly." ³⁰