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.

But the pornification does not stop at horror media. There is food porn - the glorification of the image of food, of the idea of eating food, which like pornography values only those qualities that can be readily reproduced for mass consumption (namely the image) and then exaggerates them to obscene proportions so as to compensate for the lack of tactile feedback and the inability to satiate. The images of food porn entice the viewer to lick, dislocating the sense-memory and crowning sight above scent in the bestial hierarchy. By comparison to food porn, the everyday meal is pale and limp, lacking in luster, colour, sheen, and ultimately appeal. The viewer must seek out more dishes, ever further afield, without ever grabbing hold of the meaning of a meal: to satisfy the eater in the present moment.

These examples of pornification are not really pornification at all. They appear that way because of the way the image has so completely and obviously infiltrated and totally replaced the realm of pornography that any similar process appears by comparison to be an extension of that process. But that process is properly understood as the reification of the image as perpetuated by the spectacle.

But pornography (at least the bad pornography that dominates the genre, I am unaware of any that is good) is not referred to as sex-spectacle. Torture-porn is not torture-spectacle, food-porn is not called food-spectacle. Porn has become synonymous with spectacle, and the public, lacking in familiarity with the articulation of the spectacle by Debord, reaches out and grasps for the nearest fruit, and so by association porn becomes spectacle and the preferred modifier to all corrupted consumption.

Addendum

Greater sins than the reproduced image have been produced in the image of food. In some cultures elaborate food sculptures are made from plastics and other loathsome chameleonic materials, made to look sickly sweet and glistening with flavour, and are presented in store fronts to advertise the real thing. While such abominable imitations are not readily reproduced and therefore cannot have the widespread and near instant deleterious effects of food-porn, there is a special kind of misery about their very existence. They are “chocolate-box” illustrations come to a brain-dead half-life, consuming three dimensions of space in a world overcrowded with unwanted noise. That such debris finds a comfortable home in the island of Japan should be a source of national shame and the cause for deep introspection.

References

Debord, G. (2004) The Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Knabb, K. London: Rebel Press.

Power, N. (2009) One Dimensional Woman. Winchester, UK: Zero Books.

Adorno, T. W. (1991). The Culture Industry. London: Routledge.