Read other letters about this article

• Thursday, May 15, 2008 10:35 PM

  How sexual judgments are made

  I was glad to see some people mentioned Lacan on a previous thread (talking about Tom Friedman's "phallic gaze"). I have my own understanding of Lacan, which builds on the well-known observation of Barthes regarding the photograph of the Black North African soldier saluting the French flag, and how images in general 'speak louder than words.'

  It seems to me that, although a lot of both bourgeois-Freudian and Marxo-Freudian ideas filtered into US popular culture during the 1960s and 70s, the way that the visual mass media actually construct their mass-psychological agenda is more Pavlovian than Freudian. It relies on the creation of conditioned reflexes of shock associated with visual exposés involving sex and violence. These effects proceed directly from the visual register to the tactile register, by-passing the verbal register : one sees the image and feels the shock (in one's 'gut,' rather than one's 'heart,' interestingly enough).

  As a result of the continuous repetition of this type of shock effect, a generalised apprehension is built up in the viewing audience. I believe that the visual-erotic imagination is non-dual : that is to say, we identify visually with all parties in a scene depicted (let us say, for example, the seducer and the seducee simultaneously, to use fairly mild terms). However, the mental 'voice-over' which constructs the verbal register (our 'thoughts') is dualistic, and therefore moralistic : it comments on the scene viewed, in such a way as to position the ego as morally unbesmirched, uncompromised by the ambiguities of desire. By 'the ego' here, I mean the self-concept made explicable in verbal terms, in the first instance to the self, but also to any hypothetical police interviewer, psychiatrist, or other authority.

  With all this going on continuously, it is a simple matter for television to manufacture and deploy titillating material which at least compromises us on a subconscious level, while obliging us to work out verbal accounts of ourselves that hopefully will leave us clear of any imputed stigma.

  And all this, in the background of any discussion of law and sexual ethics...

  —Rowan Berkeley Read Rowan Berkeley's other letters
  Permalink
  Flag
  Click "Submit Flag" if you feel this post is inappropriate. Explain why below if you wish.

  Cancel