Pornography

[Lycidas at worldnet.att.net]

DudiousMax at aol.com wrote:
> 
> Yo Dudes,
>                 There are a lot of words for love.  I'll remind you the
> Greeks had words for "filia," or brotherly love, from which we see the city
> of.  "Eros," or erotic love, which we ususally associate mostly with sexual
> lust.  "Agape," or spiritual love, by which is usually meant something
> related to "Universal Love."  There are some others, like "philosophy" or the
> "love of wisdom."  And there are the pedantic types, like "bibliophilia" or
> "love of books," and "audiophilie" for the "lover of good sound (systems)."
> So there can be as many specific types of "filia" as one can make Latinate
> combination words for.
>                 The Greeks also had some specific words for other stuff.  As
> the Logos was the word, Graphos was writing, and Porne was the word for what
> we would now call "harlot."  So Porne Graphos (pornography) was writing about
> the activity of harlots.  We have generalized that to mean writing, pictures,
> films, video cassettes depicting sexual behavior.  Such artifacts are also
> the means by which such well-respected scholars as Dr. John Money (and before
> him Wilhelm Reich) studied the various manifestations of sexual behavior.
> So, what is one man's tittilation (erotic stimulator, rubbing the titties, if
> you will) is another man's research material.

I don't want to quibble about etymology, but this is not
quite the case. Pornography cannot be so generalized back to
the Greek porne and graphos. 


Dr. Money and Reich? Now that's a curious combination. 


>                 I propose that Pynchon's various lovers are a depiction of
> the varieties of sexual behavior that he wants to put forth, an erotic
> typology of all the various sex activities that suit his thematic purpose.
> Various individual readers will respond to his/her favorite type of
> behaviors.  Maybe it is cynical market building on his part.  Maybe he is
> suggesting we are all hard-wired soft-machines.  That the notion of "the
> penis he thought was his own," is common to all of us, our sexual preferences
> an accident of early conditioning, not necessarily nefarious.  

Sexual preference being what? Leather? Not in Dr. Money's
sense right, but certainly in terms of fetishes. 


In any event,
> the penis mightier than the sword, or the basic biological drives are very
> strong, no matter on what they're focused.  We are all in it together.  IMHO
> that's what he's saying on one level.

An elemental principle for sure, but what we are in, say
war, can motivate, direct, such drives--flip flop. 

>                 Then again, as a satirist (a posture that presumes a commonly
> held moral landscape), maybe he is holding some of our sexual behaviors up to
> ridicule as Dante does in his Inferno.  Major Marvy, for one, doesn't get off
> too lightly.  In other words, in Pynchon's hands "pornography" is another
> trope in his bag of tricks.  It has a purpose beyond rubbing our collective
> nipples, IMHO.  Any opinions on just what that might be?  Kai?  Terrance?
> Just random thoughts.  Maybe we can come up with something?
>                 Max


I think we can. In V. (remember V. in Love, Bianca and
Melanie l'Heuremaudit) we get enfishment and history. In GR,
we get solipsism and history. The big difference is that in
V., the themes that are woven through enfetishment are
matter-- and space-- orientated, and history can be
separated, but in GR, solipsism or the insane commitment to
self,  that is the end of narcissistic convolution of
consciousness, stressing the unreality of anything or anyone
beyond or outside the self, is not so easily separated from
(his)tory. What is beyond the solipsist must be controlled
or somehow absorbed into the self. In V. Pynchon uses
mirrors, in GR, he uses cinema. If the solipsist cannot
absorb or control, he/she will destroy the other. Cruel
stuff. Pornography in GR, is an expression of this cruel
solipsistic drive for absorption or control or annihilation,
this brutality that is manifest in War, sex with children,
the relationships between nations, between adults (S&M), is
an imitation (calculus, calculated, film), an inauthentic,
REEL, that is produced by and for the  denial of Man,
Nature, and Man's place in the grand scheme of things.
Pornography is then confused for the things it imitates,
what Rathenau, with a clearer, less infected, though not
perfect, vision or vantage point on the "other side" calls
"the impersonation of Life" or "from death to death
transfigured" death converted to more death, when he
describes "the growing organic Kartel."