December 23, 2003

On Nietzsche:#5----Intensity & porno chic

In a previous entry I mentioned Bataille's desire to write with blood and to live a life of intensity through risking oneself.

Further on in Chapter 3 Bataille links this desire to "going to the furthest reaches of the possible." He adds:


"To live out possibility to the outmost means many will have to change --taking it on as something outside of them, no longer depending on any one of them."

Sounds like sex drugs and rock & roll life to me. Living a punk life of a Sid Vicious; or the excess of the glam rock and roll "avant garde" who ends up dying from choking on their own vomit in some hotel room.

Hardly the sort of life that every day suburbanites can explore. They cannot live such a life of intensity of a Paris Hilton. Theirs is a life of work, mortgages, kids, school etc. What Nietzsche calls the herd life. Nor can suburbanite Middle Australia realistically live a life of intensity through becoming drug criminals and living by the gun as urban cowboys.

Bataille understands the limitations of a life of intensity. He quotes Nietzsche to the effect that such a life is nomadic life without family, friends or community; however much one may desire a community of like souls.

Realistically it is a lonely life full of suffering that requires a lot of Stoic care of self to deal with the weight pressing down on their necks.

All that Bataille has is Nietzsche's texts and his own writing.

And us? We do not live in 1940s France. Many are exploring a life of intensity through sexuality and living out their sexual fantasies through porn and they take risks in doing so. Porn is the way to way to critique our highest moral values, destroy our sickly virtues and recover our healthy instincts. Porn is what transgresses our moral codes, even as it is tamed and civilized as porno chic by the fashion, advertising and media industries:
PornchicVh1.jpg For the fashion industry sex is in, sex is now, sex is porno chic.

Porno chic is the cutting edge in fashion as a fashion style.

Porn does not belong underground. It belongs on the fashion catwalk.

Porno chic is a marketing campaign run by the Parsian fashion houses. They---the fashion advertisers---- know that sex sells.
PornochicVH2.jpgThe advertisers say that they are simply providing a forum through which the creative genius and artistic values of some of the world’s best fashion photographers can find full expression.

But they---the advertisers and photographers--know they have to keep pushing the boundaries of taste, regulation and moral codes to ensure that sex sells their product. So we have the old avant garde technique shock being used by

The shock factor posted on billboards and bush shelters throughout the city of Paris:


"Yves St. Laurent's ghostly white naked woman, caressing herself into a state of ecstasy. She's selling perfume. Other ads feature women who are bruised, bullied, even consorting with animals. One recent billboard for the fashion house La City showed a woman, wearing only underpants, suggestively posed on all fours next to a sheep."

One of Gucci's latest advert features catwalk model Carmen Kass revealing her pubic hair, skillfully shaven into the shape of the company's trademark, whilst being pushed against a wall by a male model.
PornochicVH3.jpgIt was carried in the February issue of Vogue. Though some of these images are seen as offensive and degrading to women, the shock factor in the sexually orientated explicit images creates the exposure of which every chief advertiser dreams. It is this lure that drives the mighty, profit-hungry fashion houses, and not the promotion of innovative fashion imagery.

It is very hard living a life of intensity suggested by Bataille in consumer capitalism. This is a very different mode of life to that of 1940s Catholic France. In between stands the visual imagery of a Helmet Newton

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Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at December 23, 2003 01:18 PM | TrackBack
Comments

Bataille is known in the trade as a hot toad, if you are still reading the man, stop, and begin cultivating the lion...

Posted by: Zarathustra on January 17, 2004 12:12 AM
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