Modernism/modernity

The vagueness of nineteenth-century criteria for pornography is infamous. The British jurist Alexander Cockburn, for example, wrote that pornography “deprave[s] and corrupt[s] those whose minds are open to immoral influences,” and although his nebulous statement gave rise to some debate about the dangers of such imprecise definition, no sources suggest that contemporaries had any doubt about what constituted pornography. ¹ Though it is true that obscenity laws in England, France, and Germany were invoked to prosecute pamphlets about contraception, cheap sexually explicit texts, as well as politically suspect writing, prosecution was typically conducted with genuine confidence in the solidity of the pornography concept. ² It was only in the aftermath of World War I that charges against “pornographic” work became increasingly inconsistent, incoherent, and enacted for the most part with great reluctance. ³ In a dramatic epistemological and rhetorical shift, critics began to use the term “pornography” to designate less an identifiable category of texts and images, more the attenuation or dissolution of semantic categories that had once been clearly demarcated. The appellation “pornographic” no longer served to define so-called immoral material, but to figure the social as a body whose desire exceeded conventional boundaries between morality and immorality. This important transformation in the status of pornography usually goes unremarked, and yet the catechrestic use of “pornography” to which it gave rise informs nearly all current accounts of what pornography represents. [End Page 59]

Indeed, commentators of different ideological persuasions transform pornography’s unclear boundaries into the theoretical grounds on which to oppose censorship. Because pornography cannot be clearly defined, many American liberals insist that censors might wittingly or unwittingly target worthy ideas that they believe are pornographic. ⁴ In a more affirmative evaluation of pornography, anti-censorship feminists argue that the term designates material that refuses to define human desire in fixed terms, and will be the target of censors committed to destroying social forces (including women’s, lesbian, and gay liberation) that challenge the dominance of normative heterosexuality. ⁵ In contrast, those who are most committed to pornography’s abolition reject the assertion that pornography is an elastic category of meaning. Feminists opposed to pornography, most notably represented by legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon, argue that pornography is so central to the maintenance of men’s power that arguments about its elasticity are merely ruses the justice system employs to keep pornography legal. MacKinnon defines pornography as a form of gender exploitation, and gender exploitation as a form of pornography. The persuasive power of her analysis, however, lies in the rhythmic repetition of this tautology rather than in any precise definition of the pornographic. ⁶

Like these feminists, fundamentalist Christians (from a different vantage point) extend the notion of pornography to include an array of materials so vast and divergent that it renders their definition equally imprecise. Because pornography means everything, it means nothing in particular, which may account for the rather dramatic slippage that pairs “pornography” with images of lynching, sexuality, or even environmental pollution. Such images share only one feature: they are “pornographic,” meaning, tautologically, that they are racist or sexist, and figuratively, that they contaminate the air we breathe.

Debates about whether or not to censor pornography have thus become occasions to assert, in various ways, the elasticity of its meaning. But to the extent that elasticity defines its socio-cultural power, pornography is curiously emptied of any concrete meaning: its elasticity cannot therefore be particular to anything substantive about pornography itself. If we focus less on the explicit social agendas of different debates and address the ideological structure that makes those debates possible, we might speculate about how this construction of pornography as a conceptually indeterminate category developed.

Some scholars have suggested that pornography violates the integrity of the human body by stripping it of the abstract rights invested in it since the eighteenth century. In this view, the concept of the pornographic refers above all to instances in images or texts when a body is treated as if it were merely a body, a “thing” to be used. Frances Ferguson defines the Marquis de Sade’s...