why porn? CRASH and the revolutionary potential of erotic fantasy

I wrote this essay a good few years back for Break With Me magazine.

I'm reposting this as it was such an informative essay for me. I want to continue to build on these ideas about pornography, s/m, eroticism and morality in cinema.

Crash was one of those films that lit a fire under my vehicle of thought.  

Cronenberg’s adaptation begins with an opening credit sequence that could have been put together on Microsoft PowerPoint with Howard Shore’s theme in the background, harmoniously eliciting the feeling of caressing chrome skin with neon lights, under the pass of an infinite amalgamation of motorways of automobiles racing toward the dawn of new modes of desire. A sensual abstraction of sex and death, of eros and thantos[i]. The reflectivity of the chromatic font redirects the gaze back to today, and made me wonder how expressions of desire have manifest in this ultramodern migraine era.

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Narratively, Crash follows film producer James Ballard, and his accidental penetration into the niche subculture of car crash fetishism. Through hospitalisation after a collision on his way home from work, James is introduced to Vaughan, the film’s Christ-like figure of ragged-flesh prophecy who predicts the union of car (technology) and man. Vaughan enters the film like a fever dream, his presence tainting the subjectivity of James, and subsequently the movie, with a death drive indistinguishable from libido. This walking embodiment of psycho-sexual-pathology guides James (us) through the world of motorways, traffic jams, scarred skin, and celebrity obsession, and his presence in James's conscious relaxes the boundaries between internal and external worlds like a schizophrenic Pied Piper. 

Vaughan’s heavily scarred skin and yellowish complexion of death don’t exactly make him easy on the eyes, but something about his character - his incessant delivery of promises of escape from the banal day-to-day, is enthralling. His infantile fixation on the car crash reveals the spectacle of a modern society that can no longer rely on the ontologies that shaped it. Where moral and ethical boundaries are drowned by the light of the metropolis of moving vehicles. In a world that has infinite possibilities at its finger tips, how does one conjure excitement, passion? Where every perversity can be satisfied instantaneously, the result is a collective inertia and what Ballard coined, the ‘death of affect’. [ii]

‘Affect’, in this context[iii],  is the capacity to be moved emotionally by some sort of happening. It is a verb of experience, alluding to one's subjectivity and emotionality.  

In his work, J.G Ballard explores desensitisation due to overstimulation, emotional disconnect perpetuated by technology, and the breaking down of shared cultural and traditional values after the death of god.[iv] The backdrop of Crash is a postmodern concrete jungle in which screens feed the character's insatiable minds on ‘a diet of aircraft disasters and war newsreels’[v]; ensuring their search for pleasure is interknit with images of violence and destruction. The intimate cast seems alienated from their own lives; their wants are indistinguishable from extreme media images that define our post-facebook-beheading-videos era.  A lot of Ballard’s writing features characters on a path of desire that's purely thanatotic[vi], in hopes of liberation from their grey world of endless roads going nowhere; void of affect. For when there is no feeling, therefore no real sense of satisfaction, there is always an emotional extremity to strive towards. In this case, the car crash, which James remarks ‘After being bombarded endlessly by road-safety propaganda it was almost a relief to find myself in an actual accident.’ There’s an apparent ecstasy of fully realising your own mortality.

Ballard renders the car, which at the time was a pinnacle token of individual freedom, as a metaphor for his observation ‘that the twentieth century reaches almost its purest expression on the high way’ because of ’the speed and violence of our age, its strange love affair with the machine’. Though the automobile’s mystique may seem a little outdated now, the mythology of the car crash is still as potent. When someone crashes on the motorway, people still slow down to have a nose at the wreckage, egged on by morbid curiosity.

 In a time where the cult of personal freedoms (eg sex, mobility) have been economised, there is always more things to consume; always more hedonistic pleasures to pursue in a selfish need to overcome the individualised experience of this ~death of affect~. Replacing the insatiable with the need to do more, to be more… instead of healing the inability to humanise people, to connect with them emotionally / intimately. A much-needed reminder of our multiplicity is lost in the spectacle of burning engines.

Pornography as a genre, by practice -

is a merging of external and internal worlds. Appearing as a commercial product in modernity, pornography reflects the aftermath of a definitive discovery in Western ‘Enlightenment’: that humans as subjects, illustrate reality with the pen of their desire. Therefore, every ounce of perception, experience, thought and action is tainted with a drive that is one’s own. The blasphemous ‘I think therefore I am’[vii] doesn’t depend on a higher being granting us our personhood. Instead, humanity emerges from the ruins of history as autonomous beings, in charge of watering the flower of being with borrowed ideas from social interaction. How we each piece together our subjectivity in modern times, relies heavily on collective/personal hallucinations of ourselves/our surroundings.

The aesthetic of post-modern subjectivity explored in Crash is realised most potently in the pornographic medium, because its characters are wholly instruments of prose; the ’compositional resource’[viii] in which to explore the extremities of human feeling and the boundaries of consciousness. They act as figures in dreams that reveal the unconscious anxieties and forgotten thoughts buried in the mindless chatter of globalised living. They occupy a world staged to reveal the mind of the protagonist James, and a world with no membrane separating the outside from in.

The backbone of automobile Jesus’ promise to deliver a future in which sexual pleasure is unconfined by the logic of morality, where it is cracked open to reveal its infinite nature, is not far from what we really want to achieve in reality. Vaughan’s obsessive worship of the crash acts as a philosophical vehicle for Nietzsche’s idea that ‘only as an aesthetic phenomenon do existence and the world appear justified’.[ix] As when there is no belief of God to carry the world, one must find their own aesthetic purpose to fuel their living. The desire to eat, sleep, fuck and piss. Unfortunately for everyone in his vicinity, Vaughan embodies the obsessively destructive machine of capitalism; in which nature is to be ploughed and assaulted for the satisfaction of desensitised consumers. His aesthetic ideal is to see feminine bodies mutilated by technology, under the prophetic guise of ushering ‘the union between man and machine’. At the climax of the film, he meets his end as prophesized, flying off a freeway to collide head-first into a coach. The dream of bodies liberated by the violence of car collisions dies with him, and the characters are released from their shared psychosis of this aesthetic nihilism.

Crash as an allegory, renders the capitalist aesthetic as ultimately un-creative, running circles around itself. Destruction is an integral part of the cycle of creation, but the

philosophy embedded in Crash recognises a culture that mistakes destruction with creation. It’s an aesthetic that accelerates its own strangulation. The story points fingers at the hypocrisy of a society obsessed with violent images, fed to us by films, newsreels and computer games that hyperreal-ly dissolve into each other. It exposes our fascination with mechanicalizing the human instead of attempting to humanise the machine, which we desperately need if we’re going to risk becoming completely desensitized to the rise of reactionary conservative values + right-wing populism. The promise of liberation via hedonistic violence [the crash], is hollowed by its obvious nihilistic tendencies. Instead of embracing an approach that will reignite emotionality/intimacy/affect, the characters, because of the world they find themselves in, have no choice but to keep teasing themselves with the edge of life to feel real.

[the allegory is one for the millions of people enacting addictive, self-harming rituals in an attempt to realise the infinite nature of divinity that the erotic allows, in the wake of godlessness. In capitalism, the idea of hedonistic escapism replaces our sobering connection with the sacred.]

This hedonistic avatar of nihilism perpetuated by our 21st century void of ritual, of magic, of practices that connect us with each other, with animals and the earth on which we live; its cycles of creation and destruction, of life and death; fails to appreciate the true absurdity of living. Narratives of destruction, in which nothing is sacred but the forever morphic figure of capitalism, perpetuates a deeply pessimist understanding of nihilism [+ the world] that encourages repetitive impulsivity in lowly, never-lasting pleasures such as drugs/sex without intimacy/car crashes etc

I think nihilism ultimately lends appreciation to the absurdity of living. Instead, eliciting a freeing sensation; freeing from its thanatotic perpetuation. The fact we can, as postmodern subjects, seek our own truths, holds a hand out to us: full of limitless potential. We must collectively practise looking to infinity, looking beyond doomsday narratives and seize our futures from decrepit warlords of currency.

The car crash functions pornographically [conceptually something other than which it is known] in the way it represents a need for liberation, not from life itself like Vaughan insists, but from the reign of a globalised system that sucks the sacred nature from everything, from soil to marriage, to laughter, to creativity. God has shapeshifted; as Capital's mythology replaces the religious ideal, it transforms every thought, action, exchange into a quantifiable unit. A value that’s calculated and compared in the never-ending stock-market machina. The language of the original text ‘Crash’ is obsessively machine-like, reflecting the infiltration of indrustialized thought. James holds a distinctively scientific/pornographic gaze; observing everything with little emotion or reference to affectual thoughts. It says something about 21st century subjectivity, which confuses the scripture of Capital in inter-personal exchanges and navigations of the material world.

Here, Ballard uses the erotic as a lens in which to assess the desires of our era/culture on a micro/macro level. Subsequently, I hope it can teach us to use our own fantasies as wishes for a new, sensual world.

You cannot begin understanding Crash, or pornography/erotica in general, if you take it too literally. Pornography is meant as an exaggeration of the mechanical attributes of sex, post-industrial sex where genitals are rolled out on conveyed belts to be devoured animalistically. It's often pure spectacle, avoidant of intimacy and unashamedly playing into hierarchies of power that that're taboo. In real life, if all you had to stimulate someone was your genitals, you’d be disappointed. As many of us are. For this reason, porn is not always an attempt at recreating the erotic experience. It can be a performance of sexuality - an absurd hyperfantasmagorical rendering of sexual relations in a given time and space, tapping directly into taboo to take its ultimate form.

in this way pornography can be a medium of ‘diagnosis’, a questioning of humanity’s relationship with sex, sexuality, arousal, non-arousal. It can say; this is how society treats women, men, questions of violence, power, exploitation - what bodies are praised or discarded, exposing what people desire in the Other. In his life’s work, Jung warns us of the ramifications of leaving the collective shadow unrealised. He claims ‘one does not become enlightened by

imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.[xi]’ I think pornography is ultimately about an embrace of the shadow, allowing it to reveal every aspect of itself, every last taboo before the ego strangles, so we may attempt to integrate our conscious persona and better know our whole.

the Erotic is merely an exercise in filling in the gaps left by the gaping hyperreal obscenity of contemporary commercial pornography, and hopes to bring the feeling back into articulation; highlighting sensation, emotion, everything around the fucking; the voice, smell skin smile promises. A poetic way of relating which is very human, the way it takes responsibility for the intimacy we really crave in a hyper-individualised world.

Anais Nin: “Intellectual, imaginative, romantic, emotional. This is what gives sex its surprising textures, its subtle transformations, its aphrodisiac elements. You are shrinking your world of sensations.”[xii]

Pornography/erotica deals directly with the personal, sexually fuelled ontologies of the characters in the text, and functions as a question of representation itself. Porn is inherently somewhat autobiographical. Directly acknowledging in its formula that there is always an ‘I’ which is written from. It’s extremely difficult to talk objectively about desire as it must come from the experience and curiosity of a person writing. A curiosity that fuels the pen to dance around buried fantasies. How sex/desire is represented in the narrative; as obsessive, secret, longing, mechanical, sensual... unearths a state of mind, a unique subjectivity that lends clues to the in-between-the-lines happenings of the work. An awareness of one’s erotic intelligence[xiii] applies to how one choreographs themselves in the world. 

In pornographic works, the written world enveloped in the narrative, is merely a playground in which the subject/s enact personal fantasies. Every plotline is a means to a sexual end; a journey through an insatiable desire that must be excised through every available avenue. In Crash, every scene is motivated by this insatiable desire to feel - once more - sexual satisfaction. People’s livelihoods\bodies are merely collateral in this violent quest. Ballard's place of work, whether he has any other friends or family, what he does on a weekend that might resemble a normal life aren’t details included in the narrative of Crash, as they don’t align with his exploration of psycho-sexual fantasies. Everything is about bent chromium and smashed glass, mutilated feminine bodies and poker faces. Every act or thought lends itself to the poetry of his obsession. Obsession an important theme in pornography and sexual fantasy.

Science fiction and pornography, are both potent mediums for philosophical inquiry; what will the future say about the present?

What obsessions burning in the coal of time, will leave us in the ashes of tomorrow? 

An important lens, not only to hold up to ourselves but also the world at large. With the logic of desire deeply penetrated by capitalism; trying to measure, quantify and quick-fix every need, its roots firm in the understanding of subjectivity, force us to view ourselves as isolated individuals constantly needing to better themselves by indulging in compromised desires, revolving around otherwise useless material items and shocks of mortality. In the individual, right through to the collective, we can attempt to diagnose the implications of 21st century subjectivity by sitting with the uncomfortableness of our wants; how capitalism and all the –isms embedded, have shaped them.

Like a car caught in a crash, its insides spilling out exposed into the road - this is the potential pornography holds to help purge the rotten fantasies festering inside. ‘Crash’ for me, was a great place to start.

The Erotic must be reckoned with as a way back to the idea of the Divine [worthy of a whole ‘nother essay]. A feeling of knowing the godlike potential in us all, that fills the self with enough warmth and wonderment- to become infectious with understanding. We need to engage with the importance of developing erotic intelligence[viii] if we are to extend empathy to people

around us, and the earth we are birthed from: if we are to survive at all. If we’re able to reignite ideas about kinship, the Sacred[, gifts, ritual, the Erotic: things that ground us in an experience of collectivism and responsibility for a liveable future, then we might be able to survive longer than the apparent end of the world. A belief in the sacredness of all forms of life is the desire to know the great continuity we are disconnected from when we are born as an individual. The Erotic is our way back to this sacred knowledge of infinity. Porn [like sex] can be both sacred and profane.[xiv]

Where some porn may tell us what’s going wrong: how disembodied desire and sexuality has become in a world of expensive flashy things, the Erotic is a mission to bring back vitality. A vitality that keeps us wanting the next sunrise enough to protect it with all our being. A mission to understand and reconnect to our aliveness, our creativity and playfulness. To protect what makes our hearts sing when all the bullshit has fallen away.

Sex is not an act: it's a place we go, it’s a lens to look at ourselves through. By looking at how we relate to each Other, we understand our multiplicity; a node in an infinite network of Love.

From the Divine realisation to liberation, radical changes can be made on a personal and community level, with an updated understanding of sexuality [a decent place to start with a society obsessed with policing it]. We must fantasise about what makes us truly Joyful. Remember and rekindle intimacy with the nature of life in all its wonderful cycles. Fantasy is integral. Integral for spotting pathologies of modern experience. Essential, for daring us to create new, alternative futures that hold space for all.

[i] https://epochemagazine.org/20/eros-and-thanatos-freuds-two-fundamental-drives/

[ii] 'The Death of Affect' in J.G Ballard by Michel Delville

[iii] Brian Mussumi defines affect as simply 'the capacity to affect and to be affected’, a politics of relations, of experiences, of bodies, of things, of vibrations, seen / unseen, conscious/unconscious. [The Politics of Affect]

 [iv]  Nietzsche

[v] From the original text.

[vi] Regarding Freud’s theory of the Death Drive.

[vii] Descartes

[viii] found in The Pornographic Imagination by Susan Sontag

[ix] the Birth of Tragedy ; and the Genealogy of Morals by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

[x] see also Bataille’s concept of the ’sacred’. [Theory of Religion]

[xi] Not sure where this quote is from originally

[xii] anais nin’s introduction to Delta of venus.

[xiii] Esther Perel on erotic intelligence

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tO0xgj3kEuI&list=LL&index=25&t=39s

[xiv] Georges Bataille heavily influenced this piece. Check ‘Story of the Eye’ for a pre-Crash pornographic masterpiece.