BY STEVE BISSON
I would quickly skip the more foregone reflections on the series ‘15 Porn Stations’ by Pietro Millenotti. Starting from the etymology of the word pornography, from the greek ‘drawing prostitutes’ for the historical purpose of stimulating erotic fantasy and then flash forward a few thousand years to enable a mass diffusion through different and sophisticated media. This includes distributors of gas pumps that become like beacons in the darkness of loneliness. Of course we would hear from sociologists with their alarm bells on the production of false idols and psychologists that constrain the consequences by dusting off the few theories available. So what? On second thought, it is a topic that concerns us, that touches us intimately somehow. Despite this, I tried to approach the matter from another angle, keeping a certain distance, a little like what the photographer achieved with his photos, showing a need to unravel the problem while escaping oblivion.
To shed light I think we need to distinguish what is sexuality from what is Eros, which is the desire for knowledge and discovery, to go further, or to embrace something without much thinking. The “pornification” of the society, as is well defined by the author in his introductory lines masks, as a matter of fact, a situation far more important which is the disappearance in the adult of Eros and his/her increasing aggressiveness, more and more miraculously constrained by his securely knotted tie. The adult is the child who has dropped a little at a time the pillow or the erotic charge because of various prohibitions (shame, disgust, moral guilt) inflicted by the adults. By doing so he/she became a teenager and has instead increased the baggage of aggressiveness, to later become a perfect adult, who swears in the traffic queue. The cities have been emptied of Eros, and to realize this it is sufficient to take a ride on the subway.
The so-called “Western” individual appears to be ‘cleared through customs’ in his sexual role, and completely removed in terms of Eros. The sharp acceleration in the process of liberalization of pornography is very effective as a system of classification (or coercive system), which can hold the aggressiveness of the society through its narcissistic evolution and the dissolution of the sense of community. The individual, now deprived of Eros and the possibility of desire, is left with the illusory freedom to choose between predetermined alternatives. A vending machine on the street corner is a little like choices found on the the shelves of a supermarket. The fact that sexual relations should be monetized which are a consequence of the commodification of society as a whole is not surprising. In hindsight, it almost seems that the novelty resides in the fact that most human relationships, including sexual ones, are increasingly subjected to the devilry of technology rather than those of the economy.
The urgent question is that sexuality, so much acclaimed in magazines and cheesy broadcasts, is made problematic by the fact that is now the soul and not, as before the body, that is stripped and sold indiscriminately. This break between inside and outside of the individual at least is revealing the internal sterility of society and the nihilism that deprives us of a look into the future and forces us to an eternal present in which you share everything and nothing. And there is no way out unless there is an acknowledgment of critique, which consists of the problematization of the obvious and that in terms of “landscape”, means to undermine and not be satisfied with what you see. Millenotti, as have other masters of Italian photography before him, seems to have done that teaching which comes from the philosophers.
To read it carefully even our language is valuable. Sometimes even in the “bad words” that we use. The fact that there are more and more situations or people that “break our balls” should lead us to think that many of the complications of genital society - I quote here only its low reproductive capacity - are determined by external annoyances to which we do not know how to react. This fury against the area of the second chakra - the area of the body which also “lies less” and that would make us more free human beings, if only we paid more attention - is nothing more than a deception aimed at masking the reasons for a latent aggressiveness that in the long run can only lead to disease.
Eros, however, enables us to realize, to desire and produce abundance. If we deprive ourselves of it the greatest risk is that we give up our will and to cower in fear of our naked self while we cling to the consequent disguise of reality with an iconic representation.