This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
@Folamh3 made the following claim:
to which I objected, briefly. @twodigits expressed interest in a more detailed and thorough rebuttal. I said that I didn't want to compress it to a list of bullet points; but I realized upon further reflection that there was probably nothing shorter than a small book that could do full justice to this topic. I started to prepare an abridged version of my argument to post here, but even the abridged version broke 10k characters by the time I was finished with the introduction. So, you're getting the bullet point version. I'm happy to further expand on any of the points raised here, if people are interested.
Essentially I think that the artistic value of pornography lies in treating it as a species of horror. The greatest works of art bring us into communion with trauma, the uncanny, the abject - and sex is traumatic, uncanny, and unsettling in a particularly aesthetically interesting way; it is simultaneously both a natural and necessary act, and also the center of our strictest ethical prohibitions and most ferocious spiritual crises. I don't think that every artistic work that has pornographic content necessarily has high value, or even any value at all; undoubtedly, the majority do not. I only think that pornographic content isn't disqualifying when evaluating a work's artistic merit. That a work contains graphic sex is, in a vacuum, as informative as saying that the work contains depictions of landscapes or sunsets.
It has been remarked repeatedly in the psychoanalytic (Freudian) tradition that there is an intrinsic link between art and trauma. Kristeva writes in Powers of Horror:
McGowan and Engley on their Why Theory podcast, a podcast which analyzes both classical philosophy and contemporary culture from a Freudo-Marxist perspective, put it perhaps more poignantly and directly in their episode on psychoanalytic aesthetics:
I think this is such a lovely formulation, one that strikes me as almost self-evidently true. Existence is suffering, and the greatest works of art reconcile us to that fact; and in some sense it really is just that simple.
Further justification for this premise is given by framing it as an anti-capitalist gesture (again quoting from the same episode):
Now, I'm significantly more friendly to capitalism as a literal economic system than, well, than basically everyone else who's into weirdo continental philosophy. So unlike most of the intended audience for this work, I don't think that merely saying that something is anti-capitalist makes it ipso facto good. But if "capitalism" is treated here as a synecdoche for utilitarianism, then I can definitely get behind the sentiment being expressed. Art is the domain where we refuse to be governed by utilitarian logic; it's wasteful, irrational, even to the point of being actively detrimental; but that's what makes it beautiful.
Funny enough, in this same episode, there's a section which is very relevant to a post that @Baila wrote some time back - at 44:30 it is flatly stated that a canon of the great works of psychoanalytic art would simply be "the works that induce the most amount of psychic trauma". Eisenman has company! Of course, a purely literal reading of this claim is hard to defend from objections: if the greatest works of art are the ones that induce the most trauma, then why don't we just, I dunno, build a "sculpture" that cuts people's legs off. That would be quite traumatic, so wouldn't that thereby be the greatest work of art? Obviously some additional nuance has to be added, but I still think the claim is gesturing at something importantly true. I would perhaps invoke something like the Aristotelian idea of the virtuous mean: everything in the right amount, at the right time, in its proper place. Too much of a good thing can become a bad thing; you have to have the right amount of the good thing, and no more. I think we can imagine too, a "proper amount" of suffering. Not too little, and not too much, but rather exactly as much as is called for.
If this premise about the link between art and trauma is accepted, does anything more even need to be said in defense of sexuality as legitimate artistic content? Plainly, there is something traumatic, unsettling, "shameful" about depictions of sexuality; otherwise they wouldn't be so tightly controlled, and the claim I'm responding to would never have been made in the first place and I would not be writing this post. "No, don't go there, that's too far" - well, it's precisely an artist's job to go to such places. Nonetheless, I think some further elaboration is possible.
In many ways, sexuality is the artistic subject par excellence, because sex makes everyone see like an artist does; they see what is concealed from ordinary sight, they see the act as more than it really is. The dense network of strictures, rituals, and emotional associations that surround sexuality cannot be reduced to purely rational or utilitarian concerns about its possible harms or effects. There is something intrinsically spiritual about it, something intrinsically excessive - "here, no, here you have to stop; this is different." In an ironic way, the censorship of sexualized art is itself already a recapitulation of the fundamental artistic act; the distinguishing of an object against all reason, an act of resolute commitment, the creation of a value. Why, exactly, would anyone get so dreadfully upset about pixels on a screen, numbers on a hard drive, light entering the retina? But you know it's not just pixels on a screen; you see it as something more. It is precisely this "something more" that art makes us confront.
In Seminar VII (The Ethics of Psychoanalysis), Lacan spoke on the origin of the incest taboo:
The point being that, even if we stipulate that everyone involved is a consenting adult and no harm will result, incest is still absolutely prohibited. Strip away all "rational" reasons for caring and there still remains a primordial element that people recoil in horror from. This was empirically vindicated by Haidt's work on moral reasoning - people persisted in their moral judgements even when all of their discursive justifications had been disarmed. Only the intrinsic, transcendent horror of the act remained. But it is precisely this transcendent horror that is the domain of art.
Anyway. I don't think that fapping to porn is some great revolutionary transgressive act or something. I just think that, as I said in the beginning, the fact that a work contains graphic sexual content should not be an intrinsic mark against it. Every work has to be evaluated holistically, in its full context. I don't really accept a distinction between "legitimate" and "illegitimate" types of artistic content in the first place, but even if I did, I would think that sexuality was very much on the legitimate side, for all the reasons aforementioned.
I agree with the link between horror and pornography, in broad strokes. I just think you've made a terrible argument for that link. A better one would reference authors and artists that make the link, generally on the basis that unlike other forms of art you're just trying to maximize one lizardbrain emotional response. And then point to H. R. Giger's art as an example of the crossover, which is widely appreciate as having artistic value despite being overtly sexual and often in a more extreme way than zootopia gangbangs.
More options
Context Copy link
Seems odd to me to define all sexual art as porn. My understanding of porn is that it has the purpose of titillation, not pain. One can certainly construct sexual art but it seems different than porn in an important way.
More options
Context Copy link
But why should the reader trust you in your descriptions of art?
The way you define art is probably not what most people mean by art. It’s also not how art was understood for centuries in both the West and East. Worse yet, it doesn’t predict a subset of art that people love, like Da Vinci and Wes Anderson movies and Miyazaki movies.
Why shouldn’t utilitarianism (or approximately that) inform us about good art? For instance, we can say that good art benefits us. This includes sorrowful art where that sorrow aids in our adaption to reality. It includes horrific art, where that horror aids in our cultural wisdom. It includes architecture we intuitively find beautiful, because the experience of beauty is pleasant and healing. And it excludes art that many people find mediocre, like Michael Bay and abstract modern art. This definition would also exclude pornography, because there is little benefit to art that includes pornography, because pornography is immediately distracting due to human nature.
The only “traumatic” art I can think of for centuries of European history is the crucifixion. I’ve written about this enough on themotte, but traumatically bonding with the Christ is a way to effect beneficial personal and social change. It’s not trauma for trauma’s sake, it’s participating in a traumatic death to enjoy a dramatic rebirth.
More options
Context Copy link
I'm not sure I accept the link here. Yes, traumatic experiences through art tend to stay with you longer than abject beauty and take something from you. I still, thankfully, have not watched Funkytown, but I have seen enough on the internet that comes close. One part of getting older has been that my curiosity about exposing myself to trauma has been reduced, not increased. I don't have to do this. The only possible benefit to being exposed to things like this is that it could improve my performance under stress if I'm exposed to such things in meatspace. I won't trade the guaranteed cost of psychic damage for this potential benefit anymore. Art that relies on applying trauma, if anything, becomes diminished. It's a cheap shot to increase stickiness and earn a place in your mind that wouldn't be deserved otherwise.
The rabbit from Zootopia is hot and a little uppity. She absolutely wants and deserves to get gangbanged by a bunch of foxes. No trauma involved at all!
What's Funkytown? Or do I even want to know?
It's a video of cartel members torturing someone while the song funkytown plays in the background. Even the textual descriptions are horrific (but not long-term traumatizing IMO):
More options
Context Copy link
it's a video of a prolonged and hideous torture murder committed by agents of a drug cartel, with the song "funkytown" playing in the background.
Oh yeah, I have heard of this.
Back when I was in secondary school, some guys in my social circle spent a lot of time on BestGore. It never appealed to me, I have no interest in watching real people being actually tortured and murdered. One time I asked one of these guys "when you watch these videos, does it turn you on?" and he said "a bit".
I still have no idea if he was being honest or just trying to be shocking (he couldn't have been older than eighteen at the time). It will not surprise you that I haven't been in touch with him for over a decade.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder!
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Interesting post, but I am reminded of how revolting and deleterious I find continental philosophy. Sure, they sometimes stumble upon true and interesting statements - perhaps even quite often, like a blind chicken, granted the leisure to peck at the yard all day because the farmer will spoonfeed it three times a day anyway, finding a good number of grains - but the obscurantist language only really seems to serve the purposes of instilling delusions of the speaker's intelligence, hide argumentative flaws and open up "you don't get it" as a defense against those who point them out. Take, for example, the argument about incest towards the end. Stripped of its whoa-dude lingo, what's left of it seems to be some argument along the lines of:
Marriage restrictions serve the point of creating the framing conditions for an economy where fathers sell off their daughters in return for other spoils. Sure, nothing wrong with that, because creating arbitrary systems of rules is cool in my books.
However, you don't need to ban mother-son incest to enable the above economy!
Some people say that there might be other reasons why incest is banned, such as biology. But that's nonsense! Farmers inbreed their plants and lifestock all the time, so how can it be bad?
Therefore, there is no """"objective"""" reason to prohibit mother-son incest. It's all arbitrary systems of rules! By the way, arbitrary systems of rules are cool.
Disassembled in this way, the argument is clearly lazy and stupid. Human communities differ from the charges of a farmer in relevant ways - a farmer can breed 99 unviable monstrosities that he will promptly cull and 1 sort of viable semi-monstrosity with a desirable trait that can then be isolated in subsequent generations. The semi-monstrosity does not need to be healthy or fend for itself, because the farmer can just coddle and feed it until it is old enough to be crossbred with a healthier specimen in the hope of selectively getting rid of the deleterious traits only, at negligible cost to the farmer; neither the culling nor the coddling of the mutant impose any cost on the community of other farm animals/plants, because they don't really have a community or obligation to look out for each other; and neither of them will meaningfully resist their culling, introducing the choice between violence and dysgenic load, because the farmer is presumed to have an effective monopoly on violence.
This is not a particularly difficult counterargument to the counterargument to stumble upon. Unfortunately, the working mode of continental philosophy made it impossible for continental philosophy to consider it - the authors themselves would never write it, because ticking boxes like this would signal self-doubt and weakness that is entirely at odds with the image of the infallible sage that descends from his mountain to pronounce deep wisdom that the lowly students must compete with each other to understand, which a Continental Philosopher is supposed to project; and if one of the students pointed it out, he would presumably just receive a pitying smirk from Lacan, and perhaps a remark about how he is clearly yet to grasp the difference between the signifer and the combinatoire or something. Maybe some other student could help him out by writing a longer Lacanian tract expounding on how he doesn't get it. Who would side with some beta nitpicker over the chad sage who has his own (surname)-ian adjective as a lemma in the Collins English Dictionary?
I have little doubt that the Eisenmans of the world would go for this if they could get away with it.
I think reading and writing big words is fun and enjoyable. And it rarely matters to me if the original author had a high opinion of their own intelligence or not. (Undoubtedly many posters here have big egos because of their intelligence as well, but that doesn't hinder my enjoyment of TheMotte). So I think the poetic language is a good thing, up to a point (you can always take anything too far, of course).
Yeah, there definitely are people who will just sneer with "you don't get it" in response to any criticism, and that can get very obnoxious. But at the same time, there are people who actually just don't get it! And they refuse to even give the text a chance, while at the same time passing sweeping judgements on it, and that can get equally obnoxious.
I had this exchange on HN recently, where people took a sentence from an analytic philosophy paper and were saying that it was bullshit. But that was just because they didn't know the definitions of the (frankly, basic and common) terms being used. Once I explained the definitions, people agreed that the sentence actually made sense. When you have this sort of interaction repeatedly when discussing philosophy, where people say "I don't know what that means, but I know it's bullshit", it starts to wear on you. At least take the time to understand what's being said and what the context is.
Now, I wouldn't defend all works of continental philosophy. Some of it probably is bullshit (or, more politely, "poetry"), although that in itself isn't unusual - Sturgeon's Law, 90% of everything. But you really have to evaluate every work on a case by case basis. Derrida is often held up as the archetypal example of postmodern bullshit, but if you look at something like his Voice and Phenomenon for example, and you cut away some of the poetic verbiage, I think that book is actually making claims and using arguments that analytic philosophers would basically accept as reasonable. And there's been tons of work in the last two decades on the "analytic rehabilitation" of the earliest continental figures like Hegel, Heidegger, Nietzsche, etc.
I think it's helpful to think of continental philosophy as a sort of 20th century version of TheMotte for French academics. They had their own memeplex, their own points of reference, there was a whole context surrounding it that isn't immediately obvious if you're approaching it for the first time in 2024. These guys all knew each other, they went to the same seminars and published in the same journals; sometimes they were writing "serious" arguments, and sometimes they were just shitposting at each other. A lot of times on TheMotte we'll have someone come along and say "y'know, I've just been thinkin' about this thing" - about leftists and rightists, about men and women, about whatever it is. And then they make some sweeping claim, that may or may not be particularly well supported empirically, but often enough it still makes you go "y'know, I think that guy might be onto something". And that's often the sort of value I get out of continental philosophy. Plainly there's some sort of value in this activity that we do on TheMotte, because we all keep coming here.
That wasn't the conclusion of the argument; that was a premise in the argument. What I quoted was clipped out of a much lengthier chapter about the relationship between psychoanalysis and ethics. He wasn't trying here to demonstrate that there is no objective reason to prohibit mother-son incest; he was basically just assuming it, with reference to Lévi-Strauss's work as support. Rather he was using the distinction between father-daughter and mother-son incest as an illustrative example to show how there are some domains of human activity that are governed by market logic, and some that are not, and psychoanalysis is interested in the latter.
You can of course challenge his premise, and claim that he didn't support it well enough. But that just goes without saying; philosophers attack each others' premises all the time.
Well, yes? That's literally his position. He would say that the Law is baseless and arbitrary, but that in no way implies that we should get rid of it. The subject who refuses to allow himself to be "duped" by the Law and steadfastly "sees it for what it is" is psychotic. And being psychotic is a bad thing. (Deleuze and Guattari thought that being psychotic was a good thing, which precipitated their big break with Lacan.)
I do agree that there's a cultural aversion in continental philosophy to showing doubt and uncertainty about your own arguments, and I think that's a bad thing. Analytic philosophers are just better in this regard.
Not entirely off base (especially if we're talking about Lacan specifically, and how he actually dealt with his students - it's well-documented that he was a bit of a dick), but at the same time, I think you're underselling the amount of disagreement that actually exists in continental philosophy. No matter how great a continental philosopher might think his favorite guy is, he's still acutely aware that there are lots of other people who all think his favorite guy is bullshit. The Derrideans and Deleuzians think that the Lacanians are all closet fascists because they still believe that there's a unified human subject with transhistorical properties, and the Foucaultians think that the Derrideans have an inflated view of the power of philosophical discourse, and the Marxists think it's all postmodern bullshit that's distracting us from the real material struggle of the working class. So would the other students all come to correct the student who pointed out an objection? Maybe, but they could just as easily say "yeah, you're right, that stuff is all crap, you should read this instead".
Sorry in advance that I'm only responding to part of your points (and thanks a lot for writing them; I thought I should be more explicit about appreciating it since you are otherwise just eating downvotes from the lurker gallery) - I have read and thought about everything, but it was a choice between not responding at all and procrastinating way more than I can justify to myself.
I don't think "poetic" is the right term for what I see in these writings. A poet, I imagine, is someone who finds new, surprising and accessible ways of expressing a complex or rare sentiment; an obscurantist finds complex and inaccessible ways of circumscribing a common or simple one.
Well, it equally wears on you when you repeatedly have an interaction with people who essentially say "I don't know what that means, but I know it's deep". I'm sure you could see some symmetry between those who are serious about philosophy fighting off hordes of foot-soldiers of the tribe that is opposed to the philosophers' coalition and those who are serious about anti-philosophy fighting off hordes of foot-soldiers of Team Philosophers, but the symmetry is broken by the philosophers alone being in the position where they could have chosen to express themselves in a way that forestalls the "I don't know what that means" part.
Relatedly, insofar as it addresses why there are such foot-soldiers on the philosophers' side, and why people like you may underappreciate their number and impact -
I think this is an instance of the Motte of a Motte-and-Bailey that is commonly deployed in defense of every academic discipline that operates according to "humanities rules". Motte: "This is just a bunch of guys shooting the shit. Sometimes they even produce interesting things that I personally enjoy. Why do you, an outsider who doesn't even appreciate any of this, barge in and try to impose rules such as your 'epistemic standards'?" Bailey: "These people are the world authorities on philosophy. We pay them to do philosophy and all philosophers agree that they are the most influential and insightful philosophers, so we should defer to them in matters of philosophy." As a result, there are Lacanians and Deleuzians sitting in IRBs and ethics boards and asking to be persuaded, in their terms, before I am allowed to use my funding to perform scientific experiments (this is mildly overstated for the sake of argument; I have only dabbled in stuff with human subjects and most of my work is mercifully untouched beyond the 60% institutional overhead that is used to subsidise the humanities); we defer to them in questions of what arguments are acceptable in politics and school; and ultimately they are what anchors the chains of trust and authority that we use to determine which political movements are legitimate (at risk of pulling clichés from the bingo board, the argument that the druggie who runs off with five pairs of sneakers as he torches the store is misguided but has his heart in the right place ultimately leads back, via many chains of simplification for political expediency, to some humanities tract full of "poetic language") and which ones are to be treated as threats.
(The most prominent not-obviously-political counterpart of the same dynamic result in cities tiled with brutalist wannabe 1984 film sets. I think people feel the commonalities between a two on a visceral level: it's no accident that Orbán's Budapest is one of the few European capitals that is basically devoid of modern architecture.)
Thank you for taking the time to reply, I really do appreciate it.
Sorry if I didn't emphasize this enough, but I did say that you had to evaluate every work on a case by case basis. What I meant that "guys shooting the shit" is a helpful way to approach some continental works. I don't think it's the best way to approach all continental works. Derrida's Voice and Phenomenon lays out some claims and arguments in the philosophy of mind that, I think, can be phrased in simple and accessible terms. Foucault's Discipline and Punish is a pretty down to earth history of the development of the western prison system over the last several centuries. They're just, like, normal books. Nothing too mysterious going on.
I do think that Lacan goes off the reservation sometimes, to the point that the commentaries and secondary sources on his work are sometimes better than the original works themselves. But that doesn't mean that everything he wrote is bad, and it certainly doesn't mean that every work of continental philosophy is bad.
"Deference" to an "authority" is a concept that's about as antithetical to philosophy as you can get. For every single claim in the history of philosophy, you can find examples of someone asserting the opposite; for every canonical philosopher, you can find another canonical philosopher who thought the first guy was an idiot. Even if you were to just focus on continental philosophy alone, I really can't emphasize enough just how fragmented it is. Philosophy just is debate and disagreement, in a way that no other field is. I mean it when I say that if you walk into an English department (which is where continental philosophers usually hang out in the US) you can find people who think that Lacan was bullshit and evil, Sartre was bullshit and evil, Derrida was bullshit and evil... who is the authority to defer to? No one would be able to agree!
Analytic philosophers I think are quite scrupulous about this, to a fault. Because of continental philosophy's greater focus on specific figures rather than isolated positions and arguments, it's more common to get people who are "fans" of one figure or another, and I acknowledge that sometimes it looks like they're treating them as an authority figure. Although I don't think that's really what's going on usually. When someone says "Marx said X" for example, it should be read as more like "X is a claim that was developed in Marx's work, so you should refer to his works if you want further justification for it" or "I believe X is true, but I didn't come up with it, Marx did", rather than "you should believe X because Marx said so". More like citing your sources, rather than an assertion of authority. Even if someone did start treating their favorite philosopher like an authority figure, they wouldn't be able to do so without major cognitive dissonance, for all the reasons mentioned above; they'd have to explain why there are a lot of other philosophers who think their favorite "authority" was wrong about everything.
I can't personally vet the psychology of everyone who talks about philosophy. Maybe there are some people who really do believe "X is true because Y said so". But, that doesn't reveal anything in particular about philosophy itself. That just reveals that that particular person is dumb and wrong. It would be like saying that data fabrication is a part of science because some scientists have fabricated data before.
I would be legitimately fascinated and highly interested if you could provide specific examples of that happening.
I think you're overestimating the real world impact of academic philosophy here. I think it would be kinda neat if it actually did have that level of impact. But I don't think it does.
I believe (and please correct me if I'm wrong; I'm not trying to put words into your mouth) that you see a direct causal link between continental philosophy on one hand and contemporary wokeness on the other. It's a claim that I've seen repeated in various forms on TheMotte on multiple occasions, and I've always disagreed with it, for 3 main reasons:
Broadly speaking, I don't think that people hold the political positions they do because they read a book, or even because they talked to someone who read a book. I think people believe the things they do because they want certain things (wealth, power, various types of freedom, etc). The desire and the need for something concrete comes first, and then they look for an ideology later to justify it. So, for example, I don't think that DEI exists in the US today because of humanities academics. I think it exists because that's naturally the sort of thing that arises when you have an ascendant coalition of racial minorities and a demographically declining racial majority.
The "big names" of continental philosophy are not particularly woke (there's little in their work that would be recognizable as modern wokeness, anyway) and in fact I think there are resources in their work that could be a benefit to anti-wokeness.
Regarding the point about obscurantist language - do you think that's somehow necessary to leftist politics? If they were forced to only use simple words then the whole thing would collapse? Because I think that's clearly not true. You can easily put all the key tenets and arguments of wokeness into simple language. To reiterate the point above, woke people are woke because of the intrinsic content of the positions, not because they were hypnotized by a humanities tract.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
And a huge part of that context is that they were writing in French. About half the time one of the OG continentals appears to be spewing word salad in English translation, it turns out that the original French is relying on a pun or allusion that didn't survive translation. But the industry of Anglosphere "pomo" that was inspired by continental philosophy (but mostly lives in English departments) is mostly staffed by mediocre scholars who only read Foucault and Derrida in translation and think that the word salad is the point.
An easy-to-explain example is Roland Barthes' Death of the Author. Reading it in translation, the connection between the "author" who is dying and an auteur-director in visual media is not obvious, and the dismissal of fiction-writers as mere "scriptors" is incomprehensible. But in the French, the auteur who is dying in the literary world and the auteur who is triumphant behind the camera are one and the same word. The weak form of Barthes' claim is "JRR Tolkien can't be an auteur in the way Peter Jackson is because the experience of reading Lord of the Rings is co-created between author and reader in a way that the experience of watching a movie isn't" and the strong form (which Barthes does endorse) is that JRR Tolkien has no more input to the experience of reading Lord of the Rings than a screenwriter does to a movie, and have you heard the one about the starlet so dumb she slept with the writer?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
All horror about sexuality emerges from the initial biological condition [that, if you never have sex, you're objectively worthless] combined with the Just World Hypothesis (or as you phrased it, the notion that there's a "proper amount" of suffering required for sexual fulfillment).
The incest taboo is naturally derived from this: the problem is that a man is getting more sex than he deserves through nepotism. This is also the argument against [heterosexual] child sexual interaction; for M/f, it's "he's taking advantage of a female unable or unwilling to price sex correctly" (both of which are theft- the former from the girl herself, the latter from all women), for F/m, it's "she's giving the only asset she actually has for free/in advance to someone who hasn't/might never earn it". (And m/f is either one or the other on a case-by-case basis.)
This is also why Abramic religion "needs" to set a taboo for male homosexuality, because [despite what its followers will claim] that's not a taboo that comes from biology (including M/m)- because if it's happening, the dom/top earned it. Sure, it's not going to result in babies, just pleasure/sophisticated masturbation, which is why the Catholic church in particular falls back on "natural law" explanations of why it's bad, but it is natural that the dominant partner in the relationship just gets to do this by definition. Besides, the women any man of worth has acquired (as property) sometimes aren't willing or able to submit to sex at any particular time.
But that's inconsistent with the fact that, given the above, you're "cheating" the system- you're getting a facsimile of what you are supposed to dedicate every fiber of your being to getting, and sometimes, you're getting a superior product, for free, to someone else who had to put in a great deal of effort only to score a woman so undesirable she couldn't even give herself away.
And yeah, I'd be real pissed off about people being better than me too in an environment where sex is a scarce resource- horrified, perhaps. This goes double for prostitution, where sex is given an explicit price; men do not want to know how much existential fulfillment costs because their entire instinctual sense of self-worth is built on being able to afford better (and women do the same thing, as their entire instinctual sense of self-worth is built on how high a price they can charge).
Sure it can; I just did it. This is identical to the "irreducible complexity" claim Intelligent Design creationists use- whereas I posit the reason most people do this is because it's been true as a property of all life so long as to simply be instinct (combined with the fact that we're the only rationalizing animal).
Some people are able to identify when their instincts are operating and have open enough personalities to point them out, but it's unreasonable to expect everyone to, much less intentionally reject them, much less back up that decision to reject them. People that do this anyway are "abnormal".
More options
Context Copy link
I'm not a prude, I acknowledge that explicit sexuality (even unsimulated sex between actors) has its place in art. But your comment, while thought-provoking, has done nothing to dissuade me from my original perspective that human culture is not in any way enriched by a rendering of the bunny rabbit from Zootopia getting gang banged.
I'm just curious - what does it mean to "enrich" human culture? Do you have examples of modern works that have enriched human culture?
To me, it seems like it's useful to have that stuff around, just as a canary test that free speech is really working.
Since you asked for modern works, a world without the film Tár would be poorer than one with it.
Of course, I'm not calling for creepy fetish art to be banned. Just like "hate speech" - I think that people yelling racial slurs makes our culture slightly worse, but I'm not calling for them to be banned.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Thank you, that makes me very happy! I really appreciate it.
Something I may not have emphasized enough was that there's a fundamental ambiguity in that claim. Does a drawing of the rabbit from Zootopia getting gangbanged enrich human culture? Does, say, a non-sexualized drawing of a horse enrich human culture? We can't really answer the question as it's posed. We need more information, more context. Is the drawing of the horse Guernica, or is it something that a kindergartner put together with finger paints to take home and put on the fridge? That information is going to change how we answer the question. So it is with fetish art as well. That's my position.
I'm somewhat sympathetic to the claim that we've passed the point where any individual drawing/painting can constitute a "significant enrichment to human culture". We've been painting images for thousands of years and we've explored a tremendous amount of the possibility space. It's possible that we've simply run out of fresh ground to cover, within the confines of this one medium. But a painting with a sexual subject matter is no worse off than any other type of painting here.
I think the future possibilities of art lay in what could broadly be described as "narrative", and I do think some of those narratives will contain sexual content that might strike some observers as "excessive" at first glance.
Well now you're putting words in my mouth, which I don't appreciate. At no point did I claim that creepy fetish art doesn't significantly enrich human culture, but that non-creepy non-fetish art does significantly enrich human culture. Given the vast rate at which humans create art (e.g. 100,000 songs are uploaded to Spotify every day) and Sturgeon's law being what it is, the likelihood of any given artwork having a significant impact (positive or negative) on human culture is about the same as winning the lottery. Creating art is almost always done purely for the amusement of the creator himself, and I say this as someone who devotes a large chunk of his spare time to making and distributing music. Even the proportion of artworks which are created with the expectation of turning even a modest profit (or breaking even) are a small minority.
What I said was that depictions of Judy Hopps getting gang-banged fail to enrich human culture in even the most meagre way. That is to say, if someone draws Judy Hopps getting gang-banged, at best the existence of this "artwork" has zero impact on human culture whatsoever, and at worst it makes human culture very slightly worse (appeals to humanity's baser instincts, a waste of the artist's time when he could have spent it doing something more edifying, promoting gooning rather than self-improvement etc.). I'm not saying that art which depicts something beautiful or moving makes human culture significantly better; I'm saying that creepy fetish art will never make human culture even a little bit better and have a good chance of making it slightly worse.
I wasn't trying to attribute that claim to you at all. I'm sorry for the confusion. That's a claim that other people have made, and I brought that up to give some context about my thoughts on painting as a medium.
Right, and I disagree, for the all the reasons I outlined in the OP. I think that sexuality is privileged as an artistic subject matter, and therefore a pornographic painting is no worse off than a landscape, a still life, etc.
I can imagine an erotic or even pornographic artwork which enriches human culture, if only marginally. Heck, I don't need to imagine: Klimt's The Kiss (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kiss_(Klimt)) was attacked as pornographic in his lifetime, and it's one of the most iconic portrayals of intimacy the twentieth century has given us. Alan Moore's From Hell depicts sexuality and prostitution very explicitly, and it's my favourite of his works (and I think superior to Watchmen). Lolita was banned in many countries, but remains a masterpiece. It's been a long time since I saw Antichrist (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antichrist_(film)) and, while I don't think the film couldn't have done without the unsimulated sex scenes, I still think it's an impressively disquieting and thought-provoking film. There are many erotic, even pornographic, works of art which I will defend and which I really do believe have enriched human culture in ways great or small.
I just don't think the category of "creepy fetish art depicting non-human characters made for perverts on commission, and for whom the creator feels his livelihood is threatened by the advent of Stable Diffusion" contains any such works - I think 100% of works in this category had either no impact on human culture, or a negative impact. And I have no reason to expect this state of affairs to change at any time in the immediate future.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Back when the internet was younger--but old enough to load png files in seconds--the edgy memes going around my Uni were the various adventures of Smurfette, mostly of the pornographic sort. In one, Smurfette is getting it on with Papa Smurf; in another, she's banging all her fellow Smurfs.
High art it was not. But it was definitely more than porn--that is, the art had a point besides causing sexual arousal. The shock of seeing a childhood character (and I did see Smurfs on TV) going triple-X adds to the humor, but the reason these memes featured Smurfette and not, say, Strawberry Shortcake is because Smurfette was such an obviously sexualised character in the first place, yet aimed at children. The porno memes took the corporate-stated premise of the Smurfette and instantiated the subtext that any adult can see was there all along.
For added amusement, Smurfette is La Schtroumpfette in the original French, which sounds like someone bowdlerised "strumpet" by translating it into French, then German, then back to French. But this appears to be pure co-incidence - Google translate can't find a French translation of "strumpet" that looks anything like "Schtroumpfette".
More options
Context Copy link
This concept is as old as animation and cinema.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I disagree with this premise vehemently. The purpose of art is to communicate beauty and truth. Sometimes the truth communicated is about horror, inasmuch as it is a part of the greater truth of the human condition, but the things you describe are small subcategories of art. They are not foundational to what art is.
I don’t have time to defend that position, but it needs to be said. Defining art in the way you do is like defining marriage as a convenient way to save on rent: you’re missing 99% of the picture.
That's exactly what it's not! That would be a utilitarian definition of marriage. I am offering what I believe to be a thoroughly anti-utilitarian conception of art.
What is the work of art to you when it no longer has a use? When it doesn't teach you anything, when it doesn't help you do anything, when you don't gain anything from it? Do you only value it as long as it still has a functional purpose, as long as there is still some benefit to be gained (such as, knowledge of beauty and truth)? That's the real question.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Hm. I don't have time to touch on the deeper matters tonight -- and there's a lot to be explored in "sex makes everyone see like an artist does"! -- but the example of Zootopia porn is kinda interesting. There's definitely a lot of stuff in that genre that's either only 'fulfilling' in the sense of needing to wash your hands afterwards, or somewhere between junk food or lead paint chips, but there's also stories and artwork that are decently emotionally impactful, either to strong ends (eg RobCiveCat's work) or at least traumatic ones (eg Amadose's Cucking Comic).
I don't want to overstate that. The_Weaver's Pack Street series is a great example of Zootopia work, if not specifically Hopps-focused, and one that players heavily on tension (if more in the social or hubris senses than conventional horror), but is less masterpiece and more 'pretty decent fable under the porn'. For non-Zootopia works, Meesh's Little Buddy, Rund and McKinley's Associated Student Bodies, and a lot of Kyell Gold's work is porn, sometimes even to its detriment (ie a college gym shower scene that's just gratuitous), but also was helpful for a lot of people trying to get a grasp on their own interests and how they wanted to relate to others. I think I've mentioned tatsuchan18's S4S here before, but I still think it's one of the better illustrations of what certain types of submission are about, wedged into a bunch of incredibly unrealistic full-time-slave fantasy.
It's not some uranium-level enrichment, but neither is it just holes-and-poles. Won’t be something that's going to be impactful and resonant for everyone, but having the filters baked in on that isn't exactly a bad thing: contrast Catcher In The Rye for a mainstream and mostly-school-appropriate work that falters because it isn't 'for' most of its typical audience.
((M/m or f/f incest remains with some level of taboo, if you want to near-completely remove genetic health concerns, even in the furry fandom... though there's also a lot of people still focusing on it prominently. Not my kink, but no few of them are writers or artists I otherwise like. Which at first sounds like it would not be denying the 'fails to enrich culture' bit, but I'm... not sure that's true, even there, at least universally: ItTastesLikeGreen's non-incest works are unusually people-focused in a way that makes me expect at least some of his incest ones are, too.))
There's a tension where, sure, human-lead artwork can have these deeper themes and meanings, but MLgen does not. That's... mostly true, at least for now; there's only a tiny handful of AI-assisted works with prolonged content and context, rather than just pinup, and much of that content is added by humans in post. It can, contra greyenlightenment, exist for shock value as much or more than gratification, sometimes relatively subtle and non-pornographic shock value, or to communicate other messages, but a lot of it's just pinup level. I'm not sure that reflects an innate incapability, though, so much as limitations of the tools and most people just not wanting to say that much that deep.
There's the escape clause where at least some prurient content is detracting from human culture, and that's probably true under most definitions of the common good -- I don't trust most arguments about fantasy kink tricking or forcing people into real-world bad action, but there's at least some media both pornographic and otherwise that's simply filled with "hey kids try this at home"-level bad advice, and some ugly even more complicated cases. But in turn that's true about wide swathes of content, to such an extent that it provides little meaningful guidance. It's not like the contentless wolfman pinups are less related to some attempts are more engaging adult works than the contentless still lifes are from engaging conventional paintings.
More options
Context Copy link
Isn't the primordial revulsion just the reification of the prohibition?
You seem to suggest that the visceral reaction is somehow separate or disjoint from the explanation of how that came to be. That is itself a pretty big claim.
I do think that reason in the sense you're ascribing as rationale (e.g. those relating to persuasion) are not isomorphic to attempting to understand how an innate reaction might have come about.
For some historical evidence that the taboo comes before the proper understanding of the natural consequences, Xenophon's Socrates claims that the reason for the incest taboo is because the age gap is too great, and thus inferior offspring result because they have a geriatric mother/father. One can argue that it comes about as an instinct through natural selection (my guess tbh), but primitive societies simply didn't have the sample size to note the deleterious effects of inbreeding.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link