The Metapornographic Imagination

Abstract

When Susan Sontag in her 1967 essay sought to clarify the problem of pornography, differentiating between three different senses of the term (a social phenomenon, a psychological phenomenon, and an artistic convention, respectively),¹ she was writing from an historical vantage point where porn still represented a largely undomesticated area of cultural life. Then, on the cusp of the social revolutions of the following decade, Sontag seemed determined to challenge what she perceived to be the discursive hegemony of sociologists, psychologists, lawyers and arbiters of morality in debates about—and definitions of—pornography. In particular, Sontag disputes the standpoint that porn and literature are mutually exclusive forms of experience.² She welcomes eroticism in art, at least as long as it appears in certifiably highbrow works of literature. She namechecks Bataille and Reage, and takes up the position that as long as the erotic manifests itself within the context of Aesthetics, it should not only be tolerated but even commended, because the “humanistic standard proper to ordinary life and conduct seems misplaced when applied to art.”³ Nearly half a century later, those postwar worries about living in an increasingly pornographic society appear both premature and strangely exaggerated. I would like to suggest that—since the days of Sontag’s pronouncements, which were also the days of Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle⁴—a shift of sensibility has occurred in the domains of art, media and culture from the discretely pornographic toward the heterogeneously metapornographic.