Pornographic Sameness

I have been late to watching the crime procedural Bones, which features the collaboration between an anthropologist and FBI agent in solving (usually grisly) murders.

One episode in the first season centered on a victim who, among her decomposed remains, was found with evidence of extensive plastic surgery. The anthropologist, named Temperance Brennan, expressed disgust at the concept of plastic surgery at several points in the episode.

The most fascinating of these outbursts occurs in a car ride with her partner, FBI agent Seeley Booth. During that ride, Brennan focused on, not on the artificiality of the procedure, but what that procedure does to the uniqueness of one’s natural features. One minute she was a beautiful, Brennan says, and the next (that is after the plastic surgery), she is just anonymous.

This line was memorable for a number of reasons. On the surface, Brennan’s outburst highlighted the net effect of trying to stand out using artificial means of augmentation whose business model relied on an underlying logic of commodification and industrial standardisation dressed as customisation (I have written on the implications of the commodification of bodies in an article pertaining to the normalisation of abortion). The patient in these procedures, whilst indulging in the mirage of exercising agency, was completely subordinate to the dictates of surgeons and manufacturers.

Beneath Brennan’s outburst was another, more metaphysical observation, whose underlying logic became clear after reading a segment on pornography in Byung-Chul Han’s The Agony of Eros, one that riffs off the complete subordination of the self to the dictates of industry, and the implications of that subordination to one’s sense of identity.

This involves some reading into Brennan’s words, but what I got out of it is the link between that complete subordination on the one hand, and the anonymity of sameness on the other.

For context, the subtext of the episode was a debate between those who, like Brennan, railed against the artificial standards of beauty that made plastic surgery a necessity, and those who thought that plastic surgery was a legitimate form of enhancing one’s beauty, or more accurately sex appeal.

This distinction between beauty and sex appeal (Han uses the term “sexuality”) represents a metaphysical problem because of Han’s take on what true erotic passion involves, which is a sense of resistance and mystery coming from the object of one’s desires. That is, true eros requires that the one so loved retains a sense of mystery to him or her. “The erotic”, Han says, “is never free of secrecy” (32) from the other. Moreover, Han says, it is precisely this negativity of secrecy which enables true erotic communication, precisely because it is in this negativity that otherness comes into being.

By contrast, Han says that enhancing one’s sexuality has as its telos putting that sexuality on some form of display (with the most bare-faced manifestation of this coming from pornography). The moment this exhibitionism happens, Han argues, true communication becomes impossible, because what takes the place of the negativity of secrecy, is the “positivity” of exhibitionism, thereby stripping the one so loved of its otherness. When this occurs, what we have is a malaise of metaphysical sameness, and this sameness constitutes a vacuum of identity from which no communication is possible, erotic or otherwise.

Furthermore, what also facilitates this rendering of the uniqueness of the individual to the anonymity of the same is the posture of simply pure passive receptivity. This is relevant for our consideration of pornography especially because the central actors in a pornographic film, if they are not putting their sexuality on full display, are also doing so whilst giving the impression of pure passivity. This then is a build upon an initial observation of pornography not being erotic, because if the porn actor is caught up in this anonymising force of the same, they are not truly communicating anything erotic. As Han argues:

…nudity that is displayed without secrecy or expression approaches pornographic bareness. What is more, the pornographic face says nothing (32).

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