Motion and e-motion: lust and the ‘frenzy of the visible’

Abstract

How and why did pornography become the lust-inducing genre we are familiar with today? Why did it narrow its once wide purpose of social critique to only producing sexual arousal and satisfaction? While many scholars have assumed that an encroaching realism of both media and subject matter have brought about this familiarity, this article follows the work of Jonathan Crary to suggest that one overlooked factor might be an important change that took place in the very regime of the visible over the course of the 19th century. During this period a distanced, centered and contemplative geometrical perspective gave way to a bewildering array of subjective, physiological bodily effects and sensations produced within the bodies of observers. In approaching this question from the perspective of the early 21st century and taking account of models of both rupture and continuity, it becomes possible to understand moving-image pornography as a genre whose primary emotion was lust.