FREEDOM AND TABOO:
Pornography and the Political of a Self Divided
Robert S. Randall
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989
340 pp., $29.95
Pornography is one of those problems of social policy that can neither be resolved nor made to go away. Just when you thought you had something better to do, it returns to the political arena in a fresh form, creating an acrimonious conflict and leaving behind bad feelings and a sense that nothing was accomplished. The recent battle over government funding over allegedly obscene exhibits set off a triangular struggle between the organized artistic community, the National Endowment of the Arts, and members of Congress. One senses that the issue of public funding of purportedly obscene works of art is a long way from being settled.
Freedom and Taboo by Robert S. Randall attempts to explore the question of pornography as a public policy issue. What is particularly interesting about the book is that beyond giving philosophical parameters for making policy, Randall attempts to explain why the issue is so intractable and persistent. The foundation of his understanding of the role of pornography is Freudian psychoanalysis. For Randall, societal tensions over pornography reflect inner tensions within each individual. Pornography, Randall believes like much else in our psychic lives, is born of ambivalence. "The psychodynamic roots of pornography lie deep in the unresolved sexual conflicts most persons have." Randall argues that pornography is generated by what he calls the "pornographic within," that is, by inner sexual impulses that are straining to break free from those psychic limits to break free from those psychic limits on sexuality that were constructed during our childhood.
The pornographic within is an imagistic resolution of erotic impulses or wishes to violate sexual taboos, mores, conventions, and the like. It has psychodynamic, rather then material, reality. Pornography is a material representation, portrayal, depiction, or other symbolization of the internally pornographic through a medium of expression, usually image, language, gesture, or sound.
Pornography, therefore, is a vehicle of the desire to transgress. Without the lure of the forbidden, there could be no pornography.
Thus, in this view, if society without repression cold be realized - if one could, for instance, construct that Orphic world of non-repressive, guiltless, social relations envisaged by Herbert Marcuse — pornography would disappear, not because substitutes for sexual enjoyment were no longer needed but because pornography receives its very attraction from its embrace of vice, from its incorporation of what D.H. Lawrence called, "the dirty, little secret."
But Randall believes that such sexual utopias are impossible. He regards the need to control sexuality to be as essential a component of the personality as sexuality itself.
“If the human capacity for pornography is universal, the human interest in censoring it is no less so. This is the paradox of eroticism: we cannot be characteristically human without both the pornography and
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