Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. - book reviews

Criticism, Summer, 1998 by Lori Merish

Like Lott, Kipnis is concerned with the politics of aesthetic forms, as well as the social constitution of the category of the "aesthetic" itself. Her book engages debates about the historically shifting relationship between "high" and "low" culture, and about the role of culture, the "aesthetic," and the body in constituting and symbolizing class distinctions.

Drawing from the work of historians such as Lynn Hunt, Kipnis argues that "modern pornography (up until around the nineteenth century) operated against politics and religious authority as a form of social criticism, a vehicle for attacking officialdom, which responded, predictably, by attempting to suppress it. Pornography was defined less by its content than by the efforts of those in power to eliminate it and whatever social agendas it transported" (163). Extending that argument to the present, Kipnis shows that the category of the pornographic remains similarly labile, unstable--and political. It is certainly the case that determining what is or is not pornography is notoriously up for grabs, and changes according to the particular agenda and ideological investments of the definer, as well as the cultural location in which the materials in question are consumed (e.g., art museum, porn house). Kipnis makes the point about porn's definitional slipperiness quite powerfully when she observes that magazines like Dimensions, featuring large models in lingerie, or Guys in Gowns, featuring male transvestites, are officially classified as porn in most communities, even though the models in their pictorials are fully clothed. Pornography, Kipnis contends, is less about the specific content of pictorial, filmic, or textual materials than a cultural "container" for those representations and impulses deemed socially dangerous, a strategy for policing the boundaries of culture. Drawing, like Lott, on Bakhtin, Kipnis argues that pornography has been defined precisely in opposition to the "aesthetic," and that this cultural distinction has served to protect "high culture" against the debasements of the "low" (the lower classes, low culture, what Bakhtin terms "the lower bodily stratum"): "One aspect of pornography's social function is to provide a repository for those threatening, problematic materials and imagery banished from the culture at large--for the unaesthetic" (94). Kipnis endeavors to deconstruct the aesthetic/porn binary at different points in the book with varying degrees of success (perhaps least successfully in chapter 2, where in an unnecessarily complicated argument she recasts the art/porn distinction as involving sublimated eroticism vs. explicit sex). But Kipnis's most powerful argument is a political one: that aesthetic distinctions are not universal truths but are historically specific forms of class power; and that, in treating porn like art, we become able to see the complexity of its meanings. Staging the return of the repressed contents of culture and individual psyche, pornography for Kipnis serves as a crucial form of public discourse: "Reading between the bodies, you can ... see the way that pornography lends itself as a form, in fairly mobile ways ... for expression of what's routinely muzzled from other public forums" (viii). This is porn's chief "social service": "revealing these cultural sore spots, of elucidating not only the connection between sex and the social but between our desires, our `selves,' and the casual everyday brutality of cultural conformity" (121). In particular, porn "insist[s] on a sanctioned space for fantasy. This is its most serious demand and the basis of much of the controversy it engenders, because pornography has a talent for making its particular fantasies look like dangerous and socially destabilizing incendiary devices" (163). To the extent that Kipnis's position is a defense of porn, it is a defense of porn's publicization of the culturally repressed--thus, its exposure of class assumptions--and a defense of erotic fantasy as a crucial albeit complicated, arena of freedom.