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Sunday, May 2, 1993

Pornography Theory Now that OOO has arrived

Despite the work done by Williams and a few others, the field of porn studies is still relatively new, and there’s still a degree of stigma attached to those who work in the field. Very often this stigma follows the logic most sex-panics: “If you teach this stuff, does that mean you’re into it?” As many critics have argued, this is the general logic of homo-panic or sex-panic, in this case, porn-panic.

There's a lot more to this article than I've quoted here, but as today (Jan 2011, the 13th a Friday in rain) has been full of consequences and symptoms, as well as coincidence and need, I'll say

"Porn Studies has been on my mind since the very late Eighties. (I dropped it in 1993 having completed a book on the subject) and NOW I can see where I was stuck, indeed why I was stuck with the way that even then Porn Studies was (and still is, according to the link above) being talked and written about.
            Of course, I knew Andrea (well enough to be invited to her birthday party anyway) and I knew perfectly well that the subject was OBJECTS, and Objectification (not that that was my ONLY interest in the subject),  but her case was compelling on two levels: the first, as a writer, she completed a complete, single-handed analysis of where misogyny not only crept into the world of texts but was a cornerstone of its thinking; and secondly because she really did bring the women and girls into the front of the pornography "users" mind. (Thirdly and more truthfully, she was a writer, a real writer in the same sense as described by Burroughs, not a bullshitter).
      Those days are well and truly over. Even Tim Berners Lee said one of the good reasons for keeping pornography fully accessed on the net is because it keeps lads on the net, where eventually they will pick up the wider sociological world and new expressions inherent in the web (etc).
           However, since my reading of OOO has emerged two immediate thoughts, one in the wake of the other: the first was that I can, on sure footing re (introduce) into my own life the Rilke Angel of the Elegies; second, and this is coming as a more reluctant feature of OOO, that this re-opens the pornography file, in a completely new way, in a way that I didn't expect, that would actrually (yes, actrually) enable me to write about pornography again.
        Probably (I have already thought this through) that will require a new blog totally devoted to an OOO-porn or PoooRn writing-theory because the notion of what OBJECTS are has been (suffiently blown wide open again) such that I may actually be compelled, rather like the way Derrida suggested, to write.
        We shall see. Also of note is a line in The Poetics of Spice about the pornographic aesthetic and its Relations to Paradise, Eden, Romanticism, and all things Marco Polo... which makes 3 coincidences in as many days. I'm undecided....no I'm not! (link HERE to THE NEW OOOpornBlog.

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