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Pornoterrorism: De-Aestheticising Power
PORNOTERORISM / DE-AESTHETICISING POWER edited by Louis Armand & Jaromir Lelek ISBN 978-80-7308-587-2 208pp Essays and interventions by seventeen international artists & theorists, on subjects ranging from literary terrorism, transgression, the 13/11 Paris shootings, cyberfeminism, scifi digi-porn, Kathy Acker's terrorist aesthetics, Andrea Brady's Abu Graib poems, the digital jihadi corporate industry, schizoanalysis, polymorphous perversity, & the corporate aesthetics of contemporary dictatorship. "Naked hegemonies display themselves at every turn. Pornocommodification, epitomising the prevailing model of social life, represents the autistic conscience of the children of Marx and Coca-Cola. If History is satire, Commodity Hardcore is its gonzo a “violence without qualities” performing a collective pay-per-view mindfuck, satisfaction guaranteed in endless time-delay, from here to eternity. Pornoterror is the wake-up call for the next upgrade, instalment, panic button. Daddy’s on the TV, mummy’s on the phone. There’s always a fascist under the bed, right when you need one. Look, it’s you." Vanessa Place, Richard Tipping, Dominique Hecq, Richard Marshall, Penny Anti, Louis Armand, David Vichnar, Matt Hall, Lisa Gye & Darren Tofts, Ian Haig, Jaromír Lelek, Casey Carr, Vadim Erent, Thor Garcia, D. Harlan Wilson, Kinga Toth.
Kindle Edition
First published December 1, 2015
About the author
Louis Armand
83 books110 followersLouis Armand is a writer and visual artist who has lived in Prague since 1994. He has worked as an editor and publisher, and as a subtitles technician at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival, and is an editor of VLAK magazine. He is the author of eight novels, including Breakfast at Midnight in 2012, "a perfect modern noir, presenting Kafka's Prague as a bleak, monochrome singularity of darkness, despair and edgy, dry existentialist hardboil" (Richard Marshall, 3:AM), CAIRO (Equus Press, 2014; short listed for the Guardian's Not-the-Booker Prize), and THE COMBINATIONS (Equus Press, 2016). Described as "Robert Pinget does Canetti (in drag in Yugoslavia)," Armand's third novel Clair Obscur was published by Equus in 2011. His previous novel, Menudo (Antigen), was described as "unrelenting, a flying wedge, an encyclopaedia of the wasteland, an uzi assault pumping desolation lead... inspiring!" (Thor Garcia, author of The News Clown).
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
December 3, 2021
There can be little doubt that late modernity’s power is crafted and wielded through an aesthetic deployment, of narrative, of imagery/imaginary and of a series of simplistic and seductive binary tropes. Yet what delving into this now disappointing collection suggests is that both those aesthetics and its wielders have shifted identities and practices quickly. The collection accompanies a 2015 exhibition and functions less as a catalogue than it does an accompaniment, and while it grapples with a series of aesthetic questions it disappoints for two principal reasons.
First, it has not aged well in that much of the focus on terror turns on the imagery/imaginary of the reactionary power wielded by that force we’ve tended to label Islamist, shying away from the neo-fascist label (just as we do with other forms of contemporary populism in Trump, Johnson, Bolsanaro, Orban and more). Yet with collapse of Da’esh the Islamist imaginary has shifted focus to more diverse forces, while White Supremacist terror tactics have become more prevalent at least in the minority world, our Global North. The power of these forces by 2017 – two years after this came out – meant that the focus here has been superseded: it might come back but for the time being the emphasis here has lost its cache.
Second, despite some sharp engagements with aesthetics only Jaromír Lelek’s essay on digital jihad and Casey Carr’s on women in an imaginary of martyrdom come anywhere near grappling with the scopophilic aspects of the ‘porno’ bit of pornoterrorism. When this is taken alongside a failure to clearly conceptualise terrorism (meaning that in some essays the avant-garde of Joyce becomes a terrorist force) suggests an overall lack of coherence. I accept it is a collection of essays, but the failure to grapple with the key conceptual characteristics invoked by the title of the collection weakens its potential insights.
I can’t help but wonder what I would have thought had I read the collection in 2015/16 – no doubt a very different judgement, but alas Armand’s usually sharp grasp of the moment has let him down here.
First, it has not aged well in that much of the focus on terror turns on the imagery/imaginary of the reactionary power wielded by that force we’ve tended to label Islamist, shying away from the neo-fascist label (just as we do with other forms of contemporary populism in Trump, Johnson, Bolsanaro, Orban and more). Yet with collapse of Da’esh the Islamist imaginary has shifted focus to more diverse forces, while White Supremacist terror tactics have become more prevalent at least in the minority world, our Global North. The power of these forces by 2017 – two years after this came out – meant that the focus here has been superseded: it might come back but for the time being the emphasis here has lost its cache.
Second, despite some sharp engagements with aesthetics only Jaromír Lelek’s essay on digital jihad and Casey Carr’s on women in an imaginary of martyrdom come anywhere near grappling with the scopophilic aspects of the ‘porno’ bit of pornoterrorism. When this is taken alongside a failure to clearly conceptualise terrorism (meaning that in some essays the avant-garde of Joyce becomes a terrorist force) suggests an overall lack of coherence. I accept it is a collection of essays, but the failure to grapple with the key conceptual characteristics invoked by the title of the collection weakens its potential insights.
I can’t help but wonder what I would have thought had I read the collection in 2015/16 – no doubt a very different judgement, but alas Armand’s usually sharp grasp of the moment has let him down here.
Displaying 1 of 1 review