April 14, 2004
the sacred & pornography
Trevor,
I'm tired of all that heavy philosophy and politics. Here's something different--an article about whores and academics courtesy of this link.
It's a way of easing back into Bataille, bodies and desire. A few steps along the path and we come across this passage:
"Max Weber noticed long ago that the religious meaning that had transformed the west had escaped, leaving behind the domination of economics in western lives and a culture that imagined itself the culmination of history but was actually a nullity -- a society of cold calculation that lacked access to any form of higher meaning. But to the extent that culture in the west has become a nullity, it is a nullity that is obsessed with sex. Sexual meaning, empty as it may seem, has clawed into the iron cage and taken the place that religious meaning left behind."
The sacred is commodified, tied to the profit motive and eternally reproduced while never losing its concentration on its own romantic authenticity.
What results is pornography as a creative industry:
Guy Bourdieu, Hose
So one would then find academics in cultural/communication studies looking at the sacred as pornography as the intertextual relationships between pornography and other media genres and how pornography is integrated into everyday life.
Knut Ethret
For many in the society of the spectacle it's just showbiz or lifestyle.
Well, we've left that heavy philosophy and politics behind. We've started retracing our steps back to Bataille.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at April 14, 2004 10:51 PM | TrackBack