Pornography as the democracy of the beautiful

Pornography is about the visible. It is an erotics of the visible and an aesthetics (in the original sense of sensuality or pleasure in perception), an enjoyment that is largely consummated in seeing, the only contact the subject of this enjoyment has with the object that is the body of the person enjoyed as such. It does this in a way that need not be intellectual or have a share in the ethical or the good. It separates desire from the good. It is often condemned for making objects of desire accessible in a way that degrades and thus disrespects them. It is, to be sure, radically democratic. It is a based on a curious kind of readily exchangeable objects of use value. It is a figure of a democratization that does not pass through figures of ethics, and of a valuing of persons that does not depend on respect for them. Who can say that this is decline, or bad or sick or ugly, and not an ascent, a figure of the good and of happiness? The profane has this advantage over the sacred: It does not call for aura or election, inclusions based on exclusions, or enforcement of the value of what is rare. In the world of pornography, the object as image is enjoyed independently of appreciation of its value. We don't like it because it's good, but its goodness and badness reflect the fact that we enjoy it. Is this enjoyment demonic (or enjoyment as such), as Zizek thinks, a Marcusian repressive desublimation that only makes its devotees unhappy, a pagan insistence of a drive to repetition and destruction? (Perhaps Courbet's "The Origin of the World" is the best example of an artwork showing this. Desire's objects, being natural, are mortal bodies subject to decay and so are waste, excremental?). And what about high-class pornography, which reassures the viewer that he is an ethical subject admiring the virtues of beautiful people? Pornography invites us to evaluate our enjoyment. Bad magazines could just be relegated to prisons. Pornography is imaginary; it shows you what you like or don't like in images. It offers every Narcissus an image book with variations. Of course, what he says will get only echoes as replies.