Make Your Own Snapshot of Mainstream Culture!

Tags

Google, Internet, Job, Pornography

An experiment for all our fair readers, though not one to be conducted at work: turn off all the ‘Safe Search’ options on your browser and do an image search for ‘Job’.  At least on Google, this yields a fascinating slice of the mainstream culture – at least that part of it that is online – in the English-speaking world.  I’ve done this a few times after stumbling upon it looking for a painting by Marc Chagall last year and the results, though always shifting, are always about the same.

Well over half the images involve employment or ‘jobs’ in some way:

The other half are split more or less equally between illustrations from the Hebrew Bible book of Job and various pornographic categories – ‘hand job’, ‘foot job’, ‘boob job’, ‘blow job’, and the like (in the interests of propriety – I am an American citizen, and America owes a good deal to Puritan morality even today when so many other element of Puritan culture has passed into the mists of memory – I will leave the illustration of this final category to your imagination, which is filthier than anything I could find anyway, I reckon):

An illustration from Job by WIlliam Blake

There is something about this juxtaposition of the religious, the economic, and the pornographic that seems to perfectly capture our present cultural moment and its inherent contradictions.

It will be fascinating to do this on occasions over the coming months and even years to see if shifts in the larger culture alter the mix I found this morning (these two were taken from the first two pages of a Google image search results), or alter the proportions in which these three things appear.

Advertisement

How Biblical Studies Led to Pornography

Tags

biblical criticism, erotica, fetish, Jean Marie Goulemot, Michael Warner, Pornography

According to Jean Marie Goulemot’s account of things, when the authorities clamped down on erotic literature in the late Eighteenth Century, ‘proper’ literature became ideologically severed from salacious, lewd, licentious, and pornographic writings. The genre of pornographic literature was created. Erotic literature – which had been read by both the highest noblewoman stretched out in her private garden and the lowest servant sleeping with the cattle – was hunted down and destroyed, and its manufacturers persecuted and imprisoned.

What led to this? The growing acceptance of biblical criticism! The separation (or fetishization) of scholarly readings of the Bible from its traditional religious use coincides precisely with the separation of illicit porn from that perennial favourite, bawdy erotica.

I suspect that the fetishization of certain forms of knowledge in this period (the empirical, the rational, the critical) lies at the root of the invention of pornography. But Goulemot thinks there might be some displacement going on. The authorities were beginning to give up on ever controlling the new “criticism” (which was, above all, biblical criticism). So the scapegoat was erotic literature, which they clamped down on with increasing severity:

“Since they could not pursue those books that dealt with radical philosophical issues or contained anti-religious material, it appears that the powers that be turned their attentions to lascivious works, by a rather predictable mechanism of transfer and compensation.”

(Jean Marie Goulemot, Forbidden Texts: Erotic Literature and its Readers in Eighteenth-Century France. Tr. James Simpson. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994: 15)

So the masses became “uncritical” and consumers of porn, while the elite could debate Chaucer all they liked and still label what they were doing “critical”.

“pornographic reading… becomes a developed and familiar practice in the period of critical reading’s ascendency”

(Michael Warner, “Uncritical Reading.” Pages 13-38 in Jane Gallop, Ed., Polemic: Critical or Uncritical. New York: Routledge, 2004: 16)

The conclusion, of course, is that biblical criticism is the pornographic fetishization of religion.

Ghendt - Le midi (note the book dropped from her right hand: pornography or biblical criticism?)