Understanding Pornographic Fiction

Sex, Violence, and Self-Deception

Charles Nussbaum

• Editorial: Palgrave Macmillan
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137556769
• Categoría: Philosophy
• Categoría: Language in Philosophy

This work defends two main theses. First, modern Western pornographic fiction functions as a self-deceptive vehicle for sexual or blood-lustful arousal; and second, that its emergence owes as much to Puritan Protestantism and its inner- or this-worldly asceticism as does the emergence of modern rationalized capitalism.

1

The Protestant Ethic and Modern Western Pornographic Fiction

1.1 Introduction and chapter conspectus

There are, Susan Sontag (1967, 35) once asserted, at least three pornographies – pornography as an item in social history, pornography as a psychological phenomenon, and pornography as a “modality or convention” within the arts – and “no one should undertake a discussion of any pornography before acknowledging all three and pledging to take them on one at a time.” I acknowledge the first two and, with caveats, the third, and I do take them on one at a time, though not quite in that order. I begin with the first, then take on the third, and finally engage the second. Like Sontag, I narrow my focus to literary pornography, but not in the way she does. She addresses only pornography that in her view qualifies as literary art. This category, I shall argue, is empty,¹ although I would not deny that a given literary work may contain both some art and some pornography or that pornography may be artfully done. But artfulness does not make a work literary art. The pornography I shall be addressing is the pornographic narrative fiction of the modern West (hereafter, unless otherwise indicated, often modern pornographic fiction or simply pornographic fiction).

Although not all pornographic representation need take the form of narrative, it is clear that the narrative form plays a significant role in the way in which pornographic fiction works its central effects. Much cinema also takes the narrative form, and the analysis of pornographic fiction I offer could most likely be adapted to much of it. But any such application stands outside the purview of this work, for two reasons. First, the pornography of the written word is a large topic in its own right. The literature on it alone is large, and I will be able to address only a fraction of it. And second, I am particularly interested in the circumstances of the emergence of pornographic fiction, which obviously predated the era of motion pictures.

This work defends two main theses. First, modern pornographic fiction functions as a self-deceptive vehicle for sexual or blood-lustful arousal² (self-deceptive, because it indulges desires virtually whose satisfaction in actuality would tend to clash with dictates of conscience in neurotypical individuals); and second, its emergence owes as much to Puritan Protestantism and its inner- or this-worldly asceticism as does the emergence of modern rationalized capitalism according to Weber’s classic essay, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. (The this-worldly asceticism of Puritanism is dedicated to accomplishing God’s work here on earth, rather than merely preparing the believer for the afterlife.) Modern pornographic fiction also owes a great deal to the “formal realism” of the newly emergent eighteenth-century English novel. The novel of formal realism eschews the supernatural and pretends or purports to refer to actual persons and to narrate a series of actual events in real time. The story of the development of the modern English novel also contains an important sociological component, namely the rise of the bourgeoisie in early modern Europe. Yet this study is a work of philosophy, not sociology, economics, literary theory, or even history, though none of these subject matters bears ignoring. My principal aim is analysis, and the resources at hand include the philosophy of language, specifically the pragmatics of speech acts, the philosophy of fictional literature, and moral psychology, which is the descriptive, psychological component of a naturalistically oriented philosophical ethics.

I argue that modern Western sexual pornographic fiction emerged as a distinctive genre³ in eighteenth-century England, having descended from literary obscenity, a form already long in existence. Violent pornographic fiction, on the other hand, emerged in nineteenth-century England from the older forms of the gothic novel and the so-called penny dreadful. Whereas the obscene is an aesthetic category that concerns offensiveness in the extreme,⁴ the pornographic is a linguistic, psychological, physiological, and ultimately a moral category that concerns the pragmatics of speech acts, the psychology of self-deception, the physiology of arousal, and the morality of sexual and violent actions – the morality of the actions or action-types themselves, not the morality of the pornographic representation of such actions. (I shall not be addressing the normative question of whether pornographic representation is moral or immoral.)⁵ One of the principal aims of this work is to establish and defend these conceptual distinctions, a task that I believe has not heretofore been accomplished.

Following Glassen (1958), Feinberg (1985, 107–112) holds that the obscene is a “charientic” category (deriving from the Greek ‘charis’, meaning something like grace), a category he believes should be distinguished both from the moral and the aesthetic. On this view, charientic judgments concern neither the morally good and bad, nor the beautiful and ugly. Rather, they concern the seemly and the unseemly. Charientic judgments are properly applied to humans and their behaviors, and fundamentally concern crudity or refinement of taste. Obscenity, says Feinberg (1985, 109), is “the outer limit of vulgarity.” The distinction between charientic judgments and moral judgments is fairly clear, though the unseemly or the indecent can easily take on moral significance. A person may be impeccably moral and obscene nonetheless. Such a person’s moral behaviors may be obscenely ill-mannered, while another person’s immoral behaviors may be refined and stylish. When the stylish individual does act morally, he may act not from moral conviction, but from concerns about showing bad form. Feinberg (1985, 108) allows that charientic judgments run parallel to moral judgments in some respects – for example, with regard to what is considered decent – but insists, rightly, I think, on the legitimacy of the distinction between the two types of judgments. What is not so clear is the distinction between charientic and aesthetic judgments, which also (in standard usage both philosophical and nonphilosophical) involve the exercise of taste. We may suspect that this distinction is, at least to some degree, a terminological issue, and that any sharp separation is artificial.

This suspicion is intensified when we have a look at the way in which Glassen introduces the distinction:

Judgments in terms of ‘vulgar’ are characteristically made about persons and their acts; aesthetic judgments are characteristically made about things and experiences. To be sure, we do judge certain works of art to be vulgar, but this is only an indirect way of judging the artist to be vulgar and those to whom his work appeals. (Glassen 1958, 139)

These claims are, in my view, eminently contestable, for they presuppose an unreasonably narrow view of the aesthetic. The beautiful, on any account a notion central to the aesthetic, is a nonclassical concept (a concept not definable by means of necessary and sufficient conditions) that is extremely difficult to analyze and is applied in a variety of ways to a wide range of phenomena that include objects both fabricated and natural, but also to persons, their personal styles, and their behaviors. Persons may be physically beautiful or beautifully poised; a gesture may be beautiful, as may be a work of art, a furnished living space, or a natural scene. On the other hand, a remark may be as ugly as it is obscene. Moreover, it simply is not true that a work of art, as opposed to the artist who created it, cannot properly be termed vulgar. It would be quite unfair to tag Giuseppe Verdi, incontestably a great artist, as vulgar; but his works can, on occasion, slip into vulgarity. I do not claim that there is no place for the charientic. Rather, I suggest that it is best understood as a special case of the aesthetic. There is no need to cavil if someone wishes to label the obscene a charientic category and, as such, distinguishable within, if not from, the aesthetic. But I do question Feinberg’s claim that the obscene is vulgarity in the extreme. This is too narrow as well. The obscene is that which is extremely offensive to taste, and vulgarity is only one way of being offensive in this way.

Matthew Kieran also challenges Feinberg’s identification of obscenity with vulgarity in the extreme. But, in my view, Kieran’s own definition does not properly distinguish the obscene and the pornographic. “[X] is appropriately judged obscene,” he says (2002, 54),

if and only if either (A) x is appropriately classified as a member of a form or class of objects whose authorized purpose is to solicit and commend to us cognitive-affective responses which are (1) internalized as morally prohibited and (2) does so in ways found to be or which are held to warrant repulsion and (3) does so in order to (a) indulge first order desires held to be morally prohibited or (b) indulge the desire to be morally transgressive or the desire to feel repulsed or (c) afford cognitive rewards or (d) any combination thereof or (B) x successfully elicits cognitive-affective responses which conform to conditions (1)–(3).

Presumably, (A) (1), (A) (2), and (A) (3) are intended to be individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for obscenity, as are (B) (1), (B) (2), and (B) (3). But, as I shall be arguing, (A) (1) is necessary for pornography, but not for obscenity. There is no necessary connection between obscenity and morality,⁶ though the solicitation and commendation of certain morally prohibited cognitive-affective responses may cause extreme offense to sensibility and, as a result, be judged obscene. That eliminates one of the conditions allegedly necessary for obscenity. Moreover, (A) (2) and (A) (3) seem to require (A) (1): the placement of the (1) after “which are” suggests that the repeated “does so” in (A) (2) and (A) (3) refers back by anaphora to “solicit and commend to us cognitive-affective responses which are internalized as morally prohibited.” The grammar is, to be sure, a bit ambiguous. But if this is right, then it would eliminate (A) (2) and (A) (3) as well: if (A) (1) is not necessary for obscenity, then neither are (A) (2) and (A) (3). The same considerations brought against (A) (1)–(3) being individually necessary for obscenity apply to (B) (1)–(3).

Defining pornographic fiction, it should be clear, presents a serious challenge. “Only that which has no history,” Nietzsche famously declared, “is definable” (1887/1967, II/18, 80). Modern pornographic fiction originated as pornography of the written word, a phenomenon that most definitely has a history. Whether Nietzsche’s fine epigram be accepted or rejected, anyone who attempts to define pornography of any sort while ignoring its history does so at his peril. I do make an attempt to define pornographic fiction in a way that is consistent with its historicity, or at least to formulate a set of necessary conditions it must satisfy. A concept with so tangled a history will, however, require for its analysis considerable preliminary theoretical groundwork and historical spadework. As a result, I make no attempt at definition until the end of Chapter 3. My proposed definition (or, less ambitiously, set of necessary conditions) will, however, be a revisionary one. I shall be prescribing how the expression ‘pornographic fiction’ should be used, not describing how it happens to be used. Because much current English usage is, in my view, conceptually inconsistent and historically unaware, the locution is often applied in ways that are anachronistic or confused. We need a term to refer to the distinctive literary genre identified in this study and, in light of its invention in the nineteenth century, the expression ‘pornography’ seems the most appropriate choice.

Like Weber, we will begin by tracing the history of the phenomenon. Modern pornographic fiction did not arise de novo any more than did modern rational capitalism. Our story, however, will not just be a history. It will be a genealogy that makes use, as Weber is wont to repeat, of “genetic” not merely generic, concepts [genetische Begriffe], that is, concepts, in Weber’s technical usage, that allow the investigator not merely to categorize, but also to understand the value commitments of the intentional beings under consideration, to simulate them, to put himself inside their heads, thereby putting himself in a position to understand the evolution of these concepts. But how is a philosopher’s propounding of a sociological thesis like Weber’s to avoid the charge of rank dilettantism? To answer this question, we will have to look at Weber’s methodology.

After briefly glossing the argument of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism in section 1.2, I take up Weber’s methodology in section 1.3. Examining his conceptions of causation and probability, we learn that Weber endorsed intentional or “folk” psychological explanations of social-historical phenomena and that he held a propensity or probabilistically dispositional view of causation compatible, as I shall explain, with such a position. Section 1.3.1 briefly scouts out current philosophical views of dispositions, and section 1.4 considers the possibility of converting practical syllogisms (action explanations using desires and beliefs) into dispositional explanations.

1.2 The argument of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

Capitalism, or free-enterprise economic systems of various forms, did, of course, exist in the West before the Reformation. But its relationship with Catholic Christianity was always somewhat uneasy. Given scriptural proscriptions against usury and the accumulation of wealth, the pre-Reformation capitalist bore a prima facie onus of self-justification. This, according to Weber, is what changed after the Reformation. Placing a great deal of weight on Luther’s notion of the “calling,” Weber argued that the accumulation of wealth was legitimized as the proper aim and product of business as a worldly vocation. To become wealthy in the right way was now to do God’s work in the world.

Everything turns on becoming wealthy in the right way. Asceticism, it can hardly be denied, had been an integral component of Christianity since its inception. But Catholicism had levied different ascetic requirements on the clergy and the laity. Priests, nuns, and monks were the professionals – God’s appointed representatives. Of them much was demanded. The laity was expected to make bona fide efforts to avoid sin, both mortal and venial, but when the flesh was weak, the confessional and superordinate layers of clergy were available to buffer the layperson’s relations with God. Also available was the option of atonement and the performance of good works. With time, this degenerated into the anodyne of granting indulgences that Luther so despised – the credit for “good works” purchased but not performed.

Protestantism swept all this away. Each believer now stood in immediate contact with the all-knowing God and, as a result, found himself confronted by a newly merciless conscience. In accordance with his calling, the believer was expected to practice asceticism in this world, but not the monkish asceticism that diverted the believer’s gaze from this world to the next. “Now,” says Weber, “every Christian had to be a monk all his life” (1904–1905/1996, 121). Salvation was achieved through faith, not works, which, for the Puritan Protestant, were “not the cause, but only the means of knowing one’s state of grace” (141). This demonstrates Calvinist influence; and for the Calvinist, doubt concerning election, says Weber, was a temptation of the devil, “since lack of self-confidence is the result of insufficient faith, hence of imperfect grace” (111). Constant self-scrutiny was the order of the day: I am one of the elect; purity in deed as well as in thought is essential to my identity.⁷

It is important to note that Weber, who was something of an Anglophile (see Roth 1993), made a major distinction within Protestantism between Lutheranism and Puritanism, and he saw th...

Índice

• Cover
• Title
• 1  The Protestant Ethic and Modern Western Pornographic Fiction
• 2  Literary Discourse and Pragmatic Implicature
• 3  Pornographic Fiction, Implicature, and Imaginative Resistance
• 4  Pornographic Fiction and Personal Integrity
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index