The End of Love and Romance - Sex as Pornographic Production and Consumption - Ch. 10 of “The Disappearance of Rituals” by Byung-Chul Han

Stephen Alexander Beach 

(636 Words) 

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Chapter ten is entitled “From Seduction to Porn” and deals with a final aspect of society in which we have abolished rituals, the relationship between man and woman. He begins by making a distinction between seduction and sex. Sex, he says, is the biological function of the two, while seduction deals on the more human level in which two people “play the game” of love and attraction, mediated through societal and social rituals. 1 

[Here Han gets a bit weird by quoting Foucault on how power can be used as seduction, which I deeply disagree with and … Foucault was clearly a sexual deviant - see my previous post here - but he quickly leaves this topic behind.] 

Continuing on, Han talks about seduction as something which is akin to a type of play between the two that draws each out of their own self towards the other. This playfulness does rightly give way to the more seriousness of actual intimacy. 2 And yet what happens when the playful ritual of seduction is removed altogether for the direct expose of the sexual act stripped to its biological function? Well, that is essentially what pornography is, Han says. He points out that this is part of the larger movement to reduce the human experience to its productive meaning. Seduction is to poetry as porn is to the starkness of a the spark notes summary. Today we do not like symbolism, mystery, ritual, play, non-utilitarian modes of acting, and yet all of these have always been necessary in the human experience as they “… resist the production of meaning”, or in other words, they resist simplistic economic production and consumption. 3 

“The compulsion of production and performance today takes hold of all areas of life, including sexuality. to produce originally meant to present and make visible. In porn, the genitals are produced, presented, made totally visible. … The principle of performance has also taken hold of sex, giving the body the function of a sexual machine.” 

And so just as we have discarded many rituals from life today, seduction and ritual play of the sexes is replaced with an animalistic production and consumption view of sex. This certainly does not reflect a description of certain cultures that have resisted the change and “… preserve lengthy procedures of enticement and sensuality, long series of gifts and counter-gifts, with sex being but one service amongst others, and the act of love one possible end-term to a prescribed, ritualistic interchange.” 4

This chapter is short, but I wanted to include a longer quote from Han which sums up these points quite well. “Under the compulsion of production, everything is being presented, made visible, exposed and exhibited. Everything is subjected to the relentless light of transparency. Communication becomes pornographic when it becomes transparent, when it is smoothed out into an accelerated exchange of information. Language becomes pornographic once it no longer plays, once it only conveys information. The body becomes pornographic when it loses all its scenic aspects, when it is simply required to function. The pornographic body lacks any symbolism. The ritualized body, by contrast, is a splendid stage, with secrets and deities written into it. Sounds, too, becomes pornographic if they lose their subtlety and allusiveness, and are only there to produce affects and emotions. … Images that affect the eye and the genitals immediately, before any hermeneutic process, are pornographic.” 5 

The problem with all of this, like the point made throughout the book, is that we reduce our humanity when we reduce life to these stripped down productions and consumptions and not the mysteries that they are in actuality. There is no more sex in the truest romantic and human sense when the deeply human aspect of male and female ritual interaction, attraction, and seduction, is reduced to pure copulation. Han ends by coining the term “carography” or pornography as “meat-photos”, an apt description of today’s obsession. 6 

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6 - 89