Column 08/06/22: Pornographic Politics

Pornographic Politics

They whip him through the streets and alleys, there,
the gormless and the baying crowd, right there:
They can't get enough of that Doomsday song,
They can't get enough of it all.

I've seen the Future, brother: it is murder.

I stopped watching American presidential debates many years ago. I could write a whole article about the evil and incoherence of this process, the result of the tiny, unchecked cabal of Hollywood networks that once collectively controlled all political information realizing that it would be very profitable if they could convince everyone that they had a civic responsibility to watch Wheel of Fortune every election year. Presidential debates are not formatted like debates; they are formatted like Family Feud with a slathering of Civic Responsibility Frosting. They are entirely a negative phenomenon, and no one should watch them.

However, for the 2020 election, I made an exception. As a televized matchup, Trump vs Biden seemed bizarre beyond belief, bizarre to a degree that could only be called artistic, and for that reason intrigued me on a deeply aesthetic level. Two uncannily, bizarrely similar figures: old men with poor impulse control, swollen, sensitive egos, an overpowering impulse for the pettiest kind of bullying towards rivals and subordinates, long histories of "creepiness," "handsiness," and sexual assault towards young women; two men who have never been particularly good at the so-called "details" or "substance" of politics; two men who have spent their lives in the public eye, on video, in camera, from youth to old age; two men who out of the above qualities have developed bizarre, unique, utterly inimitable styles of thinking, reacting, emoting, and speaking; two old men in decline. I admit that, like Augustine's friend, I simply could not resist the spectacle.

What I saw for those two hours still haunts me. 

If you want to understand contemporary American civilization as a historical civilization, it is important to realize a few things. Most civilizations, especially most Imperial civilizations, are ultimately fairly similar in most basic ways. Where they differ most profoundly from each other is rarely in the things they are most proud of, or even most aware of. As Chesterton said, the more determinative differences between peoples and civilizations and historical periods are usually found in those things that everyone takes for granted or assumes without conscious notice.

Look back on America of the 20th and early 21st century from a few centuries in the future (or the past). Go back over our cultural products with the mindset of someone who cannot help compare them, even unconsciously, with the cultural products of other times and places. What would be most striking to you?

Well, if I could hazard a guess, you would likely be amazed by the sheer volume of cultural products falling into one or two categories--two categories that are really, as I will argue, one. These two categories are advertisements and pornography.

If all our cultural products could be materially realized, piled up in rooms and left to moulder and dug into centuries later by men with spades, Hitchcock and Capra and Kubrick and Wolfe and Stevens and Twain and Lynch and Lee and every other luminary of our art and culture would be simply overwhelmed and buried and rendered impossible to access by the sheer, choking volume of advertisements and pornography: page after page, sheet after sheet, video after video. An archeologist digging through all the above, if after months or years he did finally come upon some work of recognized public art, would almost certainly not recognize that he had done so: he would see the first few minutes of the Marvel movie or the art-house film or the news documentary, recognize that, stylistically and materially its visual and storytelling language was the same or at least profoundly influenced by all the advertisements and pornographies he had already seen, and quietly file it in the same category without looking further. Even genuine masterpieces would almost certainly escape his notice simply by the overpowering sameness of that all-encompassing cultural influence.

In any categorical sense, of course, advertisement and pornography are essentially the same thing: and understanding that thing is, as I have said, very important for understanding contemporary America, and especially contemporary politics. This thing, while based on earlier forms that are, to a degree, as old as human civilization, is a distinctively modern thing, based on the proliferation of information and mass-media technology and the degree and kinds of skill that can only be developed in such an environment. What characterizes this thing most fundamentally is precisely that it aims at, and to a great extent achieves, not merely the excitation, but the deconstruction, manipulation, control, and ultimately artificial reconstruction of human desire. 

It is a mistake to see the purpose of advertising as merely to excite natural desires, or even merely to direct them into certain channels: you want to eat, this restaurant serves good food. The realm of advertising is in fact a largely abstract and largely foreign one one, existing very far afield from most people's conscious experiences of desire, its excitation, and its satisfaction.

What advertising presents, rather, are entire surreal, phantasmagorical realms deliberately abstracted from consciousness, from decision-making, and from reality, and carefully populated by realized abstractions and imaginations. The basic grammar of advertising, as Baudrillard correctly pointed out, is the materialization of entities constructed, mostly at random, out of the detritus of human abstraction and subconscious imagination. By deliberately materializing and personifying the unreal, advertisements build up a sense of (un)reality where ethics simply does not exist because conscious decision-making and the actual grasping of reality do not exist. 

In this, advertisements are most akin to dreams, but dreams carefully and mechanistically constructed in the broad light of day, not according to the actual dictates of nature or desire or even abnormal psychology, but according to the external goals and will of the technical-scientific magician. Advertisements do not merely materialize our dreams: they give us new ones, bizarre ones, denatured ones, ones that naturally, and as if by magic, lead us to watch the video, click on the link, buy the products, live the lifestyle, and go to Disney World not reluctantly or shamefully, but eagerly, and as though they were the true fulfillments of our own deepest desires.

What the advertiser or pornographer ultimately aims to produce in this way, and very often achieves, is something that can only be called an idol: a materialized image treated, not as an image of a real thing, but as something transcending and perfecting tangible, mundane reality, in relation to which every real thing (even non-materialized human abstractions or imaginations or desires) is treated a sign or means or sacrifice or hopelessly inferior copy. Most fundamentally, then, an idol is an image valued precisely because of its failure to be an image, its failure to actually image or embody or point to the reality of what it represents. In this, a reversal takes place, whereby the thing valued at first as the realization or fulfillment of desire becomes the self-consciously superior goal at which we aim our desire, and to which we deliberately and even painfully force our desire to conform. Even when, after everything, we don't want to go to Disney World, we still feel like we should, and behave accordingly.

What is true for advertising is true, mutatis mutandis, for pornography, which is in essence merely a specialized category of advertising that primarily (but by no means solely) focuses on the direct deconstruction particular natural appetite. This is hardly a hard or fast enough line, though, to allow a clean division of real-world examples. Is pornography still pornography when it's used to sell a product? Asking for a friend.

When you realize all this, you realize also the degree to which, first with the rise of mass-media news and propaganda, then with the rise of TV news and 24-hour news channels, and now with the dominance of the Internet, politics itself has been gradually but definitely drawn into the sphere of advertising/pornography, at first in form and then in content. 

The vast majority of news content that one encounters these days is simply advertising/pornography, both in form and in content: that is, it is designed to deconstruct, manipulate, and reconstruct certain human passions and desires along certain (profitable) patterns.  If this is not widely recognized, it is simply because (1) of American civic religion, which in its modern corporation-driven from equates civic piety with being "well-informed" and ergo consuming corporate political content, and (2) because of the emotions, passions, and desires that it focuses on manipulating. 

(2) is not all that different per se and in itself. Modern American politics manipulates and deconstructs, generally, both simple passions such as outrage, anger, and prurience, and also more complex social passions such as self-righteousness, the desire to be affirmed and recognized by others, the desires to belong and to be accepted by the group, the desire to humiliate and dominate, and above all pride, the desire to be in control and untouchable in relation to others. All of these are also passions that are used and manipulated by advertising/pornography.

The two, then, are increasingly not really distinguishable other than in a priori terms: that is, as decreed from above by the Priestly Experts of the American Civic Religion, who demand that you show your Piety and Social Consciousness by participating in their Sanctioned and Holy version of Corporate Advertising Content.

This basic equivalency is hard to ignore once it is recognized--and its explanatory power is vast. Increasingly Internet politics are divided, not as you would expect, into groups based on economic interests or intellectual beliefs, but into bizarre, ad hoc social groups dominated by outsized, uncontrollable hatreds, likes, dislikes, and unthinking reactions that resemble nothing so much as brand preferences or sexual fetishes.

It has been well observed that there are few things as disturbing or productive of an odd sort of personal and moral shame as being forced to bear witness someone else's obscene (especially artificial, pornography-driven) sexual lusts and idols and fetishes. I have noticed, however, that the embarrassment and shame I feel when being forced to witness someone falling down a rabbit hole of Internet politics, indulging in the constant, drug-like retweeting and reacting and emoting and expressing outrage and anger and hatred and contempt in perfect synchronization with their "feed," is precisely the same. This sense of shame, like all such shame, varies in proportion to someone's general moral status: most disturbing of all is to see older people, people of previous generations, respected elders with numerous interesting and unique experiences of the world, intelligent people, people who I respected or even still respect on other levels, indulge in this disgusting, grotesque, and obscene behavior in public.

While this was not true for earlier iterations of the Internet (and while no doubt it is still true in many dark holes of the Internet), it is no longer all that hard to avoid being subjected to other people's pornographic sexual dysfunctions publicly on the Internet. Avoiding the public manifestations of people being manipulated and reconstructed on a thousand bizarre patterns by pornographic politics, though, is increasingly difficult: and it is getting worse.

Here, though, is the really damning thing: that, as Chesterton pointed out a hundred years ago, on a basic and inescapable moral level, pornography that inflames and manipulates people's pride and self-righteousness and despair and contempt for others is much, much worse and more damaging than pornography that merely inflames and manipulates people's sexual passions.

In my lifetime, I have seen political anger and outrage go from a rare indulgence to a daily and hourly and even moment-to-moment addiction of a vast proportion of the American population. As Chesterton, again, pointed out, such anger, as a natural reaction to injustice, is in fact an immensely important thing, which when properly tuned has been a driver behind most of the important political events in history. In the face of manifest injustice, we should feel this natural, political passion, and it should drive us to do something, immediately, to end the injustice we perceive. Of such passions true politics are born.

Many people perceive in the recent growth of political anger a positive sign for political change: in reality, though it is the precise opposite. A people passively glutted in outrage is, in fact, more incapeable of actual political discourse and actual political action than any other. The future of such a people is tyranny--the tyranny of people like Biden and Trump, pornographized specters of the twisted human desire to dominate and be dominated, humiliate and be humiliated--and nothing else.

The real reason why advertising, pornography, and pornographic politics is bad is, in fact, because natural human desire is good, and of great importance for driving and preserving human life and happiness and the common good. Without normal, natural sexual desire, driven almost to extinction in places like Japan and increasingly in the United States of America, where is the future of the human race? And without normal, natural political and social passions, trained and tutored in virtue, how can there be political justice and the common good?

To return to where we began. When I went to the arena to watch the Trump/Biden debate, I was shocked by what I saw: two tired, unhappy, barely coherent old men behaving precisely as they had been trained, by a lifetime in the public eye, to do: to materialize, inflame, and deconstruct the warped human passion to humiliate and hurt and mock and dominate. 

There was no content to the debate; there was hardly any real conflict or disagreement; there certainly was no debate. What there was, however, was an infinity of moments where each man simply ignored the other, turned to the camera, poised himself like a ballerina, and delivered a momentary, warped fantasy of dominance and victory and self-righteousness and self-affirmation to the baying, jeering crowd in the virtual Colosseum. Very few of these moments constituted an insult as any ordinary person would recognize; very few of them really had anything to do with the people or politics involved; many of them took place simultaneously, as the two confused old men spoke over each other and the well-coiffed representatives of Corporate Journalism alike. They did their job, though: they materialized our desires, the incoherent fragments of our subconscious mind, and then reconstructed them on a far grosser and more unnatural plane. Progress was made.

I came in expecting a spectacle: what I got was a far more extreme spectacle than I had imagined possible: the supreme contemporary manifestation of pornographic politics. I felt degraded merely by watching it; and I was; as were we all. 

Perhaps we will get a rematch in 2024: but I, for one, will not be watching.