swampman posted:

I don't know either :^[
but I don't think the current state of education and sexuality expresses anything but our hatred of one another.

I want to learn more about guilds!!

In pornography, the utopia of a classless society displays itself through gross caricatures of those traits that distinguish classes and their transfiguration in the sexual act. (. . .) If we look for the truth content of pornography, it immediately displays its artless and insipid claim to happiness. The essential character of this happiness is that it be enactable at any time or place: whatever the initial situation, it must inevitably end up in a sexual relation. A pornographic film, in which by some mischance this did not happen would, perhaps, be a masterpiece but it would no longer be a pornographic film. (Agamben, 1995: 73^4)

The second essential characteristic of pornography consists in the necessarily episodic nature of the happiness whose possibility it attests to: ‘it is always a story, a moment seized on, and never a natural condition or something taken for granted’ (Agamben, 1995: 74). Thus, pornography a⁄rms the potential for happiness at any moment in everyday life, but this happiness is neither conceived as a natural condition of humanity nor as a utopian ‘everlasting heaven of pleasure’ (Agamben, 1995: 74), but is rather explicitly presented as anecdotal, a moment seized in the context that would at ¢rst glance seem to make it impossible, that is, at work.

This is why Agamben speaks of an ‘insipid social-democratic zealousness of pornography’ (1995: 75). In its promise of happiness, pornography displays the ‘utopia of a classless society’, but it only does so in the context characterized by ‘a stubborn insistence on class markings in dress at the very moment that the situation both transgresses and nulli¢es them in the most incongruous of ways’ (Agamben, 1995: 73). By marking class di¡erences (‘the aprons of maids, the worker’s overalls, the smocks and halfmasks of nurses’) at the moment when they dissolve in sexual union, pornography asserts that happiness (the ‘classless society’) is only accessible in and by virtue of the relations of work that otherwise preclude it (Agamben, 1995: 73). In this manner, the pornographic a⁄rmation of happiness goes hand in hand with its evasive withdrawal.

(Prozorov, Pornography and Profanation in the Political Philosophy of Giorgio Agamben)

In a programmatic essay ‘In Praise of Profanation’ from the book Profanations (2007b) first published in 2005, Agamben returns to this theme of the illusory character of the pornographic representation of happiness. The key feature of Agamben’s concept of profanation is the emphasis on free or experimental use in contrast to possession or property. Profanation should be distinguished from secularization, which ‘leaves intact the forces it deals with by simply moving them from one place to another. Profanation neutralizes what it profanes. Once profaned, that which was unavailable and separate loses its aura and is returned to use’ (Agamben, 2007b: 77). The profanation of the sacred object removes it from a separate sphere, in which its use was proscribed or regulated, and renders it available for free use in a myriad of non-canonical ways, making the object in question a ‘pure means’, whose being is divorced from any end and is wholly manifested in its sheer potentiality for whatever use (see Agamben, 2000: 49^60, 2005c: 77^87, 2005b: 61^3).

It is in this context that Agamben returns to pornography’s false promise of happiness, which he now terms ‘producing the unprofanable’ (2007b: 89) and links with the more general logic of the society of the spectacle under late capitalism. In Agamben’s reading, inspired by Walter Benjamin’s account of capitalism as a religion, capitalism is characterized by a paradoxical coincidence of absolute profanation and absolute consecration.The familiar process of ‘all that is solid melting into air’, of the liquidation of traditions, identities and forms of life under the aegis of the absolutization of exchange value evidently marks the moment of a thoroughgoing profanation of all things sacred. Yet, this profanation is immediately recuperated by a correlate gesture of the absolute re-sacralization of every object in the form of the commodity. For Agamben, consumption, the separate sphere to which all objects are consigned as commodities, marks an absolute impossibility of free use, insofar as to be consumed the object must first be possessed as property. In contrast, ‘use is always a relationship with some thing that cannot be appropriated; it refers to things insofar as they cannot become objects of possession’ (Agamben, 2007b: 89). In the contemporary phase of capitalism, characterized by the eclipse of both use and exchange value by ‘exhibition value’ (Benjamin, 1969: 225; Agamben, 2007b: 90), the capitalist dream’ of producing something ‘absolutely unprofanable’ is ful¢lled in the consecration of the profaned objects themselves, that is, of pure means that have already been divested of all canonical use.

If the apparatuses of the capitalist cult are so effective, it is not so much because they act on primary behaviors but because they act on pure means, that is, on behaviors that have been separated from themselves and thus detached from any relationship to an end. In its extreme phase, capitalism is nothing but a gigantic apparatus for capturing pure means, that is, profanatory behaviours. Pure means, which represent the deactivation and rupture of all separation, are in turn separated into a special sphere. (Agamben, 2007b: 88^9)

The best example of the capture of pure means in the society of the spectacle is language as a pure means of signification as opposed to any signified content. In contrast to various historical forms of the authoritarian control of language as an instrument for ideological indoctrination, contemporary capitalism ‘assails in its idling, that is, in its possible profanatory potential, preventing language from disclosing the possibility of a new use, a new experience of the word’ (Agamben, 2007b: 88). In this manner, spectacular capitalism does not simply profane the sacred or sacralize the profane but rather neutralizes that which it itself has profaned, withdrawing it from any possible use and thus fortifying the reign of nihilism, in which the dissolution of traditional forms of life does not lead to creative experimentation with their residue but leaves humanity suspended in the sheer negativity it reveals: ‘The pure means, suspended and exhibited in the sphere of the media, shows its own emptiness, speaks only its own nothingness, as if no new use were possible’ (Agamben, 2007b: 88.)

It is this neutralization of the profanatory potential that is exemplified most starkly by pornography. In his brief history of the pornographic genre Agamben notes the tendency towards the transformation of the sexual acts of the models into pure means or ‘gestures’ that no longer communicate anything but the sheer potentiality of communication (Agamben, 1999a: 77^87, 2000: 49^60). As the models in pornographic images increasingly demonstrate to the spectator their awareness of his or her gaze, their own expressions become ever more brazenly indi¡erent, ‘showing nothing but the showing itself (that is, one’s absolute mediality)’ (Agamben, 2007b: 90). It is precisely this profane mediality that is recuperated by the apparatus of pornography in a representation that may be consumed in masturbatory activity but never brought to use as such.

What it captures is the human capacity to let erotic behaviours idle, to profane them, by detaching them from their immediate ends. But while these behaviours thus open themselves to a different possible use, which concerns not so much the pleasure of the partner as a new collective use of sexuality, pornography intervenes at this point to block and divert the profanatory intention. The solitary and desperate consumption of the pornographic image thus replaces the promise of a new use. (Agamben, 2007b: 91)

(Prozorov, Pornography and Profanation in the Political Philosophy of Giorgio Agamben)

babyfinland posted:

EMPHASIS ON THE FEED...

haw haw haw haw haw

much like your posting

Impper posted:

eggplants posted:

"your little typology posts are really good and original, i enjoyed readin em!! good luck, you should keep writing them" - message Imppersent me yesterday on Tumblr where I have a different name and a cheesy picture of myself hahaha

your posts on that is not the post U have in the op, which is bad & dumb

whats wrong with it

Impper posted:

also discipline likes it which automatically makes me distrust

is it because she makes you feel bad about your life lol

jools posted:

Impper posted:

also discipline likes it which automatically makes me distrust

is it because she makes you feel bad about your life lol

no, not at all lmao