Fashionable Noise: The Pornographic Imagination January 22, 2008
Posted by bstefans in : Uncategorized, Fashionable Noise , trackbackA last remark by Sontag is suggestive of the aesthetic, even spiritual, power that CPs possess, when she writes that pornography points
to something more general than even sexual damage. I mean the traumatic failure of modern capitalist society to provide authentic outlets for the perennial human flair for high-temperature visionary obsessions, to satisfy the appetite for exalted self-transcending modes of concentration and seriousness. (p.70)
One immediately thinks of poets like Blake and Rimbaud (who were open to sexual investigation in their work) or to Carlyle and Pound (who weren’t) and their “visionary,” perhaps paranoiac (see footnote 35), obsessions that often resulted in enormous, detailed creations. None of these works could be considered “programmatic,” but they were all premised, in different ways, on rhetorical structures involving feedback and variation – Blake’s characters in Europe, for example, which never settle into stable physical properties – a poetic method that seems peculiar to information-saturated sensibilities on the verge of engulfment. The CP’s demon can thus be seen as the virtual embodiment of the medicine man, the half-cracked partner in aesthetics who makes a visionary of even the most bureaucratically-minded programming artist. Consequently, since coding is the most marginal of literary activities – if it is literature at all – it shares with pornography the distinction of being a textual industry that is nearly entirely unserviceable for personal edification or, indeed, socialization.
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