"The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self" 4.1

The march through Carl Trueman's book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, continues into Part 4 subtitled "Triumphs of the Revolution." The first chapter of this part, The Triumph of the Erotic, looks at two fields of human endeavor through the lens of Trueman's preceding cultural history: surrealist art and pornography, the elite and the demotic.

Trueman has led his readers on an argument beginning with Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the eighteenth century through some contemporary feminists with a focus on intermediate figures Marx and Freud. In brief, contemporary American culture represents a lowbrow fusion of neo-Marxist critical theory with neo-Freudian psychosexual reductionism. In briefer, the epitome of the contemporary American social imaginary is the freedom to define oneself free from anything--expect consent--that would limit personal sexual satisfaction..

Chapter 8's discussion of the connection between surrealistic art and Marxism was intriguing. That there was such a connection was a point André Breton explicitly made in his Manifesto of Surrealism. Even so, Trueman's argument for how surrealism led to the triumph of the erotic depends almost entirely on the work of Italian philosopher Augusto Del Noce. I found this section of Chapter 8 inadequately supported.

By contrast, the section of this chapter, "The Pornification of Mainstream Culture" demonstrated Trueman's own work. It is very good. Trueman begins this section by analyzing the success of Hugh Hefner's Playboy magazine. Magazines with titillating photographs had been around for decades but Hefner was the first to combine this feature with serious interviews. The wide range of interview subjects surprised me. They included Bob Dylan, Eldridge Cleaver, Fidel Castro, George Wallace, Jawaharlal Nehru, Bertrand Russell, Ayn Rand, and Jean-Paul Sartre. And of course, notably for the Baby Boom generation, presidential candidate Jimmy Carter.

Trueman notes that "the sexualization of pop culture, of which Playboy was an important part, is now all pervasive but is something of a comparatively recent development." (283) Part of the effect of this distinctive turn in popular culture, and what distinguishes it from the nudes of the Renaissance and later art, is the turn from beauty as a transcendent form to "the cult of sexuality." (284) In other words, today's portrayal of the female form has been eroticized. One can observe that the effects of constant, popular visual eroticism on teenage girls have been uniformly negative.

At this point Trueman considers the "shifting feminist attitudes to pornography." Early feminists characterized pornography as an example of male domination within a patriarchal society. Some more recent feminists have been more sanguine about pornography, with at least one trading in the notion of "ethically-sourced" pornography. In Trueman's words, "this speaks eloquently of the impact of the therapeutic and of expressive individualism [even] on feminism." (287)

More significant, however, is Trueman's discussion of the social significance of pornography. For both sexes, "fantasy worlds left unchecked have a habit of impinging on reality and remaking it in their own image." (288) How so in the case of pornography? By "detach[ing] sex from real bodily encounters." (289) The large majority of sexual encounters historically took place within a recognized and ongoing social relationship. Technologically mediated pornography breaks that connection even within a relationship like marriage. "This message--that sex is all about the individual and what personal satisfaction and pleasure he or she can derive from it without reference to the other" (289) characterizes the solipsistic modern self. Thus,

If freedom and happiness are epitomized in sexual satisfaction, then pornography becomes a medium, perhaps the obvious and certainly the easiest and least personally costly medium, of liberation and fulfillment. (290)

Trueman continues with additional trenchant analysis of the social effects of the triumph of the erotic that I won't take the time to summarize here. Suffice it to say that so far this is his best chapter.