PORNOGRAPHY

  
Judith Butler is Chancellor's Professor in the Department of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at Berkeley. I'd heard stories of her electrifying lecture style -- that she strode into packed halls in a leather jacket and transfixed the audience with her charisma. In person, however, Butler turned out to be anything but flamboyant. Slight and soft-spoken, with brown hair cut short, she radiated intellectual intensity. But there was nothing militant about her
manner. She spoke with forceful clarity, in wondrously formed blocks of critical prose, which could have gone straight from the notebook to the page. "This is Foucault's nightmare," she said of the Starr report, referring to the French philosopher's prediction that sex would come
to dominate our social discourse, thereby obsessing us without liberating us: "Even those who seek to debunk the centrality of sexuality become mired in it. There's a real question about
whether the Republicans have disseminated porn on the Internet." But she acknowledged that the definition of what constitutes porn has changed. "There are shifting standards. Things that used to be pornography no longer are. You need a more subtle definition. If you teach Kipling, you have to say it's a colonial text, but let's think about the insights it affords us. It's the same with porn. Does it make us what we see? When Linda Williams teaches, she doesn't
try to get people to enjoy it but to understand the nature of pleasure. What is the social script? Does the taboo produce the pleasure? Does it afford us a more careful understanding of what's happened to sexuality as it enters the public sphere? Is there a way in which it
liberates us from shame? That's a complicated set of ethical questions."

For Butler, who has a Ph.D. in philosophy from Yale, the academic preoccupation with porn, like the obsession with sexual-identity politics, is an outgrowth of the sixties, but it's less a vehicle for self-liberation than another theatre of "contestation" --to use the academic term. "It's not a utopian ideal, it's just a new area of struggle," Butler told me. "Sexuality has a history; it takes certain forms; it's a cultural inheritance. When you read Marcuse now,
he seems out of another time: 'Express your sexuality and there will be peace on earth.' But what we call liberation can turn out to be shattering -- forget monogamy, intimacy, family. And what happened? We all ended up on psychiatrists' couches."

--James Atlas, "The Loose Canon: Why higher learning has embraced pornography," The New Yorker, March 29, 1999