By Paul Virilio
"Larry Flynt is still in the street, the fundamentalists are screwed." This was the Libération headline which announced, in that newspaper's own inimitable style, the conclusion of the trial which had pitted the extreme-right French fundamentalist AGRIF organization against Columbia Tristar Film France. But let us recall the facts.
On February 17, 1997, in Paris it was not easy to avoid the posters for a Milos Forman film devoted to the exploits of Larry Flynt, an obscure gangster type who had become the king of the pornographic press in the Reagan years; it was difficult to escape the omnipresent image of a kind of crucified figure hanging from the G-string of a tiny woman.
On February 18 the deputy public prosecutor for the Paris region, taking his lead from an American ruling, expressed an opinion in favor of removing these posters on grounds of not obstructing the public highway.
The next day, judge Yves Breillat, retreating perhaps from a decision which might set a precedent, launched into a "scholarly iconographic analysis" and in the end persuaded the court not to follow the prosecutor's recommendation: the film posters were not to be withdrawn.
A prosecutor pleading infringement of liberties, a judge dismissing the case in the name of specious aesthetic convictions — this banal affair of indirect advertising had at least the merit of revealing once again the shortcomings of a magistracy which is trying, as best it can, to cope with the progressive disappearance of its traditional reference points. Since, at the time, no blockage had occurred around the posters in question, one might in fact wonder what the public prosecutor could possibly mean by "obstructing the public highway," unless one were, in fact, to update his argument.
Since the posting of advertisements is designed to arrest the gaze and capture attention, it is regarded as dangerous for precisely these reasons and is duly regulated along fast roads and on the main highways.
The law of 1979 in France even accepts the notion of "visual pollution," which may be caused by not only the positioning, but also the lighting and the density and proliferation of advertising material outside large conurbations.
Was it our prosecutor's ambition to see these restrictive measures extended to the cityscape? Might what is illicit in the countryside also become so in the town?
Why not — when we know that, by their own admission, American advertisers are now setting about what they term a new world ecology, in which it will be possible within a few hours to inundate all the great cities of the planet with thousands of copies of a single poster, which would force every city-dweller on the planet, against their will, to view something now no longer offered for their contemplation, but imposed upon their gaze?
By proceeding against the poster for Milos Forman's film not merely for its blasphemous content or its obscenity, but also for its infringement of essential freedoms, the public prosecutor was projecting us into a completely opposite scenario: was not the blustering Larry Flynt, the Christ of porn, the martyr of freedom of expression, the defender of non-conformism, actually the symbolic instrument of an enterprise with totalitarian aims?
Indeed, where the — direct and indirect — advertising campaign surrounding Flynt's exploits is concerned, another pressing question arises: can the world of the night be over-exposed and dragged into the light without ceasing to be itself? Can what was marginal yesterday become mainstream with impunity?
As we see once again with the rather lame verdict arrived at on February 19, 1997, one of the major difficulties encountered by the porn market is that it is not really accepted in the public sphere. Like prostitution, it has difficulty escaping "the private world of indecency" and finding a proper legal footing in public spaces and on our highways and byways, which, as everyone knows, are among the last legal refuges of a certain morality and its prohibitions (on drugs, alcohol, sex, etc.).
Unless pornography achieves a conflation with another form of international traffic — the traffic in culture.
This was, we may note, the option chosen by judge Breillat. The real issue in the Larry Flynt affair was this fusion/confusion of pornography with that freedom of expression generally accorded to cultural activities.
One frequently hears it proclaimed that "Art cannot be immoral," whereas what ought to be said is that it cannot be illegal.
In losing any sacred character, it long since entered the baneful Goethean triangle of "war, commerce and piracy, the three in one, inseparable" (Faust II).
For a long time now, too, the "art lover" has been transformed into a silent witness wandering through galleries and museums which, with total impunity, contain the illicit products of wartime plunder, ethnic massacres and other criminal acts (tomb-raiding, dismantling of religious buildings, etc.).
Anglo-Saxon free-market economics merely confirms this state of affairs when it advocates non-discrimination in trade and wishes to include culture in the "service category" and as one of the many spin-off products offered to consumers by the multinationals (games, films, CDs, travel, etc.).
With the invisible trade in services succeeding, and even opposing, the visible trade in goods, advertisers assert that they are no longer there simply to sell objects, but to create new forms of behavior and to serve as counterweights to industrialist pressure.
In 1993, at the time of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) negotiations, this type of immaterial operation already accounted for more than sixty percent of the gross national product (GNP) of the industrialized countries and represented thirty-five percent of international transactions. And when you see professionals like those in the Disney Corporation shedding the Puritanism appropriate to a disappearing family market and going in for hyper-violence on the ABC channel and sex, with, among other things, "Gay Days" at Disneyland and Disneyworld, you can better discern the objectives of a porn market which is not without its by-products either. By merging, and becoming confused, with culture it might finally escape the last legal restrictions and would also profit from non-discrimination with regard to "services" …
As the dominant influence of the 19th-century scientistic and positivistic philosophies draws to a close, one can better discern the usefulness of the new sex-culture-advertising complex and the predominant promotional role it plays in this "phenomenon of evil deeds committed on a gigantic scale, which could not be traced to any particularity of wickedness."
So far as the so-called arts of representation are concerned, the anonymity of anatomy beneath the human skin had already showed through in the work of da Vinci, a development later to be confirmed by Rembrandt, and later Géricault hovering around the morgues of the great hospitals, and even in the Cubism of Picasso, who painted his portraits of women "the way you dissect a corpse," as Apollinaire remarked.
This banalization of cold perception — paradoxically, a privileged feature of the scientific gaze — in fact developed an aesthetics specific to that gaze: a kind of elementary structuralism which was to infuse fields as various as the visual arts, literature, industry, design or even the social and economic utopias of the 19th and 20th centuries.
However, when the Viennese Actionists insist upon the private encounter with the camera for their performances, the watching gaze has long since ceased to be that of the artist or even the scientist, but belongs to the instruments of technological investigation, to the combined industrialization of perception and information.
Writing of photography, Walter Benjamin incautiously explained: "It prepares that salutary movement by which man and the surrounding world become alien to each other, opening up a field in which all intimacy yields to the illumination of detail."
This precisely describes the endocolonization of a world without intimacy which we are seeing — a world which has become alien and obscene, entirely given over to information technologies and the overexposure of detail.
Paul Virilio was born in 1932. After the war he trained as an artist in stained glass, working with Braque and Matisse, as well as studying philosophy at the Sorbonne. At the age of eighteen, inspired by the Abbé Pierre and the movement of worker-priests, he became a Christian and a militant. In 1975, he was made director of the Ecole Spéciale d'Architecture in Paris. He has written 15 books, including "War and Cinema" and "Open Sky." This essay was excerpted from his latest book, "The Information Bomb" (Verso, 2000).
Footnotes:
1. "Krieg, Handel und Piraterie/Dreieinig sind sie, nicht zu trennen" (Act 5, Scene 2, lines 1187-88).
2. Hannah Arendt, "Thinking and Moral Considerations: A Lecture," Social Research, fall 1970, vol. 38, no. 3, p. 147.
3. "The invisible truth of bodies," seen on the eve of the French Revolution, in works like Jacques Agoty's claiming to illustrate "the interaction between the scalpel and the engraver's chisel," and closed systems such as Georges Cuvier's law of subordination of the organs and the correlation of forms which inspired Balzac in his studies of social life.
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