Having read Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan I have to admit to finding it both dated and still ahead of its time in many ways. McLuhan asserts that each new media influences and eventually changes the culture, and that these effects are not only not understood, but not even documented.
Pornify This!
Everywhere there is the pornification of a subject. The horror film genre birthed the sub genre of torture porn on the back of the success of the Saw franchise. In torture porn films the aim is not so much to scare, surprise, or terrify the audience, but rather to titillate by means of the macabre. Audiences are unnerved by imagery of hooks in flesh, of peeling skin, and all manner of contusions. Thereby they are invited to empathise with the image and so they find themselves stimulated. In the same way in which the viewer of a pornographic film may feel him or herself lightly goaded into reaching for his or her genitalia, so too does the viewer of torture porn find him or herself clutching the skin, or reaching for the ear to assure of its continued attachment. Pornography (in practice though certainly not in principle), is ritualistic. It inculcates a mechanical attitude toward sex and torture porn extends this mechanisation to bodily mutilation. Consumption of pornography leads to lack of sensitivity, a heightened threshold for arousal and a devaluing of sex and similarly torture porn cultivates a numbness to violence. Far from being a malapropism, the term torture porn is quite apt - it succinctly describes the real nature of such media: a pornification of horror.
Issues Endemic to Class-Based Thinking
In economic and political thinking of the twentieth century, Marxist theory looms large. It is trotted out with regularity and with reverence, creating both a framework and a shorthand for describing social relations. Marxist theory casts the world into a class struggle, and in this paradigm the resolution of this struggle becomes the ultimate goal.
However, such a view hardly seems durable in the face of a long view on history nor is it particularly resonant among the working class with whom it is supposedly so sympathetic. It attributes societal composition as entirely due to arbitrary cultural impositions and humanity as endlessly fungible under culture’s influence. Meanwhile biology sits quietly but comfortably in the room, daring anyone brave enough to reckon with it.
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