reification and pornography

No, this is not an attempt to generate more hits! (well, maybe just a little.) The financial crisis/credit crunch has had an impact on every sector of the world economy; large companies are failing by the score, and governments, keen to preserve jobs and stimulate their respective economies are injecting cash into failing enterprises.  While the impending bankruptcy of General Motors is the hot topic at the moment, spare a though for one of the worlds largest industries- pornography.  Here’s a link to an article from the U.K’s Guardian Newspaper, which discusses Larry Flint’s appeal to the U.S. government for a $5 billion dollar stimulus package.

          http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/jan/08/larry-flynt-porn-industry-bailout

Pornography is a massive industry, I’ve seen figures for world-wide annual revenue ranging from US $ 100 billion to $150 billion (its accounting practices are pretty murky).  That’s roughly the GDP of New Zealand! Now, I don’t really want to get into a debate about pornography and social harm in the popular sense, but I would like to look at it from the perspective of commodity fetishism/reification.

To say that person’s involved in the pornography industry are reified/objectified is not particularly new, or necessarily even a criticism. People instrumentalise/objectify/reifiy each other in far less controversial contexts; Hegel’s definition of civil society springs to mind. What I’m interested in is the the reification of sexual relationships, and the effect this has on broader social interaction. 

Pornography seems to have many similarities to the Lukácian ’spectacle’ of capitalist labour relations.  The sexual act is commodified, certainly, but the more interesting point, I think, is the passivity of those who purchase the sexual act in its commodified form.  What effect does this passivity have?  Again the empirical data is a little unclear. I’ve noticed quite a few articles lately in the popular press talking about pornography’s role in reducing  sex drive and so damaging relationships.  On the other had,  one quite often sees articles discussing the role of pornography in stimulating libido to an unacceptable extent i.e.  rape and sexual assault- most recently in the context of the Northern Territory intervention. Neither outcome is particularly good.  But the question still remains, how/why does the passivity of the spectacle result in negative outcomes? Is it the lack of ‘visceral’ experience in obtaining sexual gratification? The ease of access to sexual experience?  Or even the lack of ‘mytification’ (in the Marxist sense.) I’d be interested in hearing people’s responses.

The Role of Money.

  

I came across an article in the Sydney Morning Herald the other day, in which Rodney Adler, the former director of H.I.H, wades in to the current debate about the viability of capitalism: 

http://business.smh.com.au/business/capitalism-not-dead-rodney-adler-20090311-8ux3.html.

             Now, I think the ‘integrity’ of the opinion he expresses needs to be taken with a grain of salt; I don’t think he is any real position to talk about the hard working industrialist building up his empire over an extended period of time, when it seems he was quite happy to dip into company profits to support his lifestyle. Nonethless, he makes to points I think are worth noting.  Firstly, he reiterates the commonly held opinion, that it was excessive borrowing,( i.e., essentially, I think, the new financial instruments involved in the subprime crisis), that lead to the current state of affairs. Secondly, he talks about the aversion to risk held by those who were/are held responsible; the executives resposible for administering these instruments had little stake in the outcomes those instruments produced- it wasn’t their money. But, would that have really made any difference? My reason for asking this stems from hearing Bill Clinton give an elegant summation of the reasons for the current crisis. Stated briefly, (and grossly simpliefied)- after the dot com crash, the mood of the market was still optimistic, and there was still plenty of cash floating round.  The housing market in the US had been fairly flat for a number of years, and the excess money floating around had to invested somewhere. The intitial stimulation led to a snowball effect, and investing in property (not just residential) became the hot ticket to success. You only need to look at the amount of construction in the Sydney CBD between 2001 and 2007 to see evidence trend spreading globally.  Unfortutately, property portfolios, both residential and commercial started to perform below expectations, companies and individuals began to default on their debts, and, voila, you have a crisis.

              The point I’d like to make here, is that money has to do something- it has to go somewhere- even when its sitting in a bank, its really being lent, spent, reborrowed etc.  This goes straight to Marx’s point about the fundamental  inversion of the Capital/Money inversion.  Money’s role in ‘realising’ or producing things, like houses, or computer software, seems secondary to its function in simply increasing itself.  More on this in the next few posts.