boost: rushthatspeaks's Great Essay on the Gifts That Porn as Genre Brings

[jesse_the_k]

rushthatspeaks helps me understand why postmodernism is worth thinking about, in this excellent essay:

Samuel R. Delany, pornography, and this one webcomic I'm reading

[... snip ...] Delany points out that for much of the history of Western art and literature (the branch he knows well enough to discuss), there's been a structure of categorization similar to this:

Art <----- || -----> Porn

image description

ASCII art depicts spectrum of "Art" hard left, "Porn" hard right, and two vertical bars in the center making a barrier.

wherein you might as well call that middle separation the Line of Respectability, and never the sides shall meet. If you view pornography as a discourse, i.e. as a set of tools for working within texts, those tools comprised of the various devices people use and have used to talk about sex and eroticism with at least some purpose of evoking or inciting same, this structure immediately becomes completely ridiculous. Shutting out an entire set of tools and saying that it is impossible to make art with them is ridiculous in any context.

https://rushthatspeaks.dreamwidth.org/1086967.html

Comments

[muccamukk]

That just makes me think of the Terry Pratchett line where a picture of a naked lady is art rather than porn if it has an urn in it.

[jesse_the_k]

That's a great line!

[suncani]

Oh interesting! Thanks for the signal boost. For someone who's only exposure to postmodernism is through a political lens (*shakes fist at Foucault) , I always appreciate resources that help contextualise it.