Pornography`s media breakdown: Troubleshooting in

Porn Studies
ISSN: 2326-8743 (Print) 2326-8751 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rprn20
Pornography's media breakdown: Troubleshooting
in three parts
Kevin Gotkin
To cite this article: Kevin Gotkin (2016): Pornography's media breakdown: Troubleshooting in
three parts, Porn Studies, DOI: 10.1080/23268743.2016.1147373
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23268743.2016.1147373
Published online: 11 Apr 2016.
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Download by: [Library of Congress], [Kevin Gotkin]
Date: 11 April 2016, At: 06:27
PORN STUDIES, 2016
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23268743.2016.1147373
Pornography’s media breakdown: Troubleshooting in three
parts
Kevin Gotkin
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Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, USA
ABSTRACT
ARTICLE HISTORY
In this article I try out a number of methodological tacks to
understand what happens when porn stops working. I take the
advent of gay male VHS porn in the late 1970s/early 1980s for my
trials: a history of material technology approach that imagines
‘wear’ as analytic category; an apparatus theory analysis that takes
frustration as a central (and not peripheral or accidental)
experience of porn-viewing; and an interview approach that must
reckon with the skeins of memory and error tolerance. These
tacks overlap and combine, but ultimately fail if what we seek is a
seemingly stable place from which to observe wily dynamics of
porn’s media ruptures. I propose that to troubleshoot porn
studies’ focus on narratives of innovation and success, we must
appreciate broken porn for its unpredictable avenue to novel
media forms. This, in the end, offers a roomier gambit to
understand a doubly elusive topic (a bad object with glitches).
Received 27 May 2014
Accepted 17 September 2015
KEYWORDS
Gay male pornography; VHS;
media studies; method
Introduction
I was recently flipping through a book titled VCR Troubleshooting and Repair Guide, first
published in 1986 (Brenner 1986). I had the book laid out in front of me on my desk
and behind it was my laptop. Lately my laptop has slowed down a lot. Little things like
opening a Word document take minutes sometimes and I wonder whether I need a
new computer. One night I was trying to open the document of the text I am writing
now, but I was getting the notorious Mac ‘spinning wheel of death’ cursor. So I flipped
through this VCR troubleshooting guide as I waited. As I thumbed through the book, its
binding started to crack and pages fell out. Somehow this felt less frustrating than watching the spinning wheel of death, but still I realized I was dealing with two different kinds of
media breakdown at the same time.
After a few minutes of the spinning wheel, I decided to manually reboot my computer
by holding down the power button. I ended up having to do this three different times
before the spinning wheel finally vanished. Each time, I waited about five minutes (and
I took out my cell phone and timed it in some effort to externalize the frustration).
While I waited, I flipped through the fragile book on VCR troubleshooting.
This little scene might be a good introduction to this article because it shows that even
in trying to open the Word document in which I wanted to write about media breakdown, I
CONTACT Kevin Gotkin
© 2016 Taylor & Francis
[email protected]
2
K. GOTKIN
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encountered media breakdown. What I wanted to write about was a particular moment of
breakdown: when it happens while watching porn. I am struck by how little we know
about, for example, the moment when streaming video stops moving as the audio underneath keeps going or that odd lag when you toggle in and out of full screen mode if you
are watching streaming video in a browser. I am interested in what happens when porn is
working, when it is really doing something for you and it is enjoyable, and then what
happens when it stops. What is available for analysis in this ruptured moment?
While I was skimming this VCR repair guide as I waited for my computer to come back, I
found the following list of ‘Steps to Successful Troubleshooting’ (Brenner 1986, 8):
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
Don’t panic
Observe the conditions
Use your senses
Retry
Document
Assume one problem
Diagnose to a section (fault identification)
Localize to a stage (fault localization)
Isolate to a failed part (fault isolation)
Repair
Test and verify.
It occurred to me that what I am doing in this project is troubleshooting. Fault identifications and localizations and isolations are technical versions of what I seek in the theoretical and methodological apparatuses we have to understanding pornography. I am
taken by a double entendre I hear in the word ‘troubleshooting’. You could be shooting
trouble itself, or you could be shooting for trouble. You could be trying to untangle
things but – and here is why troubleshooting can often produce the frustration it seeks
to eliminate – you might also be unwittingly tying more knots. There is a similar doubleness in ‘fixing’ media: you could be correcting a problem or fastening it in place. In this
article, I take these contradictory semantics as inspiration. I want to proliferate the frustrations we stumble across in trying to fix things because, in the end, I am more interested in
what the 11-step model for troubleshooting itself signifies. What is the impulse to make
porn work effectively? Can we productively dwell in porn’s thwarted utility to better understand something about that utility? Broken porn is doubly evasive: a bad object with
glitches. Thus it becomes a topic that might help us think through new analytical and
methodological configurations for dealing with media and sex.
In this article, I take the early years of gay male Video Home System (VHS) porn as a
cardinal example, attempting to limn a number of approaches we might take in trying
to understand the moment when the device unspools or rips or fails to find its tracking.
When I say I am trying to proliferate the frustrations in this case study, I am putting
forward gay male VHS porn as a productive exercise in modelling the affordances of centring media breakdown in porn studies, a focus that is often foreclosed by a commitment
to explaining media in terms of innovation and success. Here I argue that media breakdown can help us troubleshoot porn studies.
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Glitchy literature
An emerging but important literature centres the failures of media as a way to conceive how
media ultimately work. These texts show how a corroborating contrary of failure is a crucial
feature of the epistemological coherence of what appears as successful. French philosopher
Georges Canguilhem ([1943] 1989) has sketched the origins of this supremely useful binary
in The Normal and the Pathological, showing how this distinction began in the birth of
modern medicine and exists in far-reaching extra-medical forms of knowledge production.
In media studies, Peter Krapp’s (2011) Noise Channels has made one of the strongest
cases for relishing rather than dispensing with breakdown. He shows how the subordination of noise was crucial for the development of information theory while also pointing out
that when noise is unfettered from this subordinated status, its aesthetic dimensions are
profoundly generative. MacKenzie Wark’s (2004) A Hacker Manifesto dovetails with this historical–theoretical approach, demonstrating that what is naturalized as ‘innovation’ in
media technologies is constructed by late capitalist strides toward planned obsolescence.
What ‘works’ is what corrects the flaws of previous technologies. But, as Rose Menkman
(2011, 340) writes in her ‘Glitch Studies Manifesto’, ‘Noise artifacts can be a source for
new patterns, anti-patterns and new possibilities that often exist on a border or membrane
(of, for instance, language)’. These texts show that the very impulse to eliminate, bury, and
forget moments of media breakdown is an effort to shore up that fragile ‘membrane’
which is perpetually threatened by the potential of failure. The glitch, then, is not
minor, fleeting, or spurious – it constrains what we understand as successful and, if
unleashed, questions deeply-entrenched theoretical and methodological assumptions.
A key imploration from this ‘glitch studies’ literature is to foreground media processes
over media products. Since glitches are concealed in the stabilizations of media products
(the journal article, for example, contains so few clues about what went wrong in the many
iterations of its making), to glimpse the dynamics of media breakdown we must peel back
what media present as their finished ‘membranes’. We must understand ‘media’, following
media scholars Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska (2012), as only temporary crystallizations of a constant flow of ‘mediation’, where technologies are enrolled in vital assemblages of organic, inorganic, material, and immaterial bodies.
Why has porn studies been slow to take up the possibilities of this glitch perspective? In
many ways, important existing porn studies texts already fit nicely with this key imperative
to put process at the fore. For example, John Champagne’s (1997) polemic against the
practice of close reading pornography can be understood as a call to consider more
expansive and mutable dynamics of porn’s interchanges. Whereas the method of close
reading saps the potentially productive threat of gay pornography by disciplining it in
the academy, Champagne calls for an attention to ‘a wide weave of forces beyond the
grasp of a discipline dedicated primarily to reading films’ (1997, 77). What Champagne
envisioned was a lithe and suspect porn studies that could slink into previously foreclosed
corners of porn’s many worlds, even, in our case, to explore what happens when porn
ceases to function.
Other methodological innovations in porn studies can also be understood as contributing to the glitch possibilities of porn I am trying to flag here. We can think, for example, of
William Leap’s (2011) illustration of the latticework of porn’s social functions through his
reading of audience responses to Lucas Entertainment’s Men of Israel. Responding to
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K. GOTKIN
Richard Dyer and Tim Dean’s glosses on the come shot as the ‘loss of control’ that can
account for gay porn’s allure, Leap writes:
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But come shots and loss of control do not take place independently of social subjects, and
limiting their discussion to the occurrence of orgasm says nothing about the intersections
of masculinities, race and ethnicity, class, regional location, and other factors that make
such an occurrence possible. (2011, 938)
Leap’s subsequent surprising – or perhaps glitchy – findings about what porn audiences
do and do not make salient is directly tied to his insistence that porn cannot be thought in
a vacuum.
Alan McKee called for a similar intervention five years before Leap in his article on the
‘insights of consumers’ for the aesthetics of pornography. Since he saw research on porn
amounting to ‘a systematic ‘othering’ of pornography consumers’ in assuming that ‘they
cannot know themselves; they cannot speak for themselves; they must be represented’
(2006, 524), McKee offers a detailed rendering of 46 interviews with porn consumers.
Giving voice to audience members whose voices are automatically met with distrust by
the critical or psychoanalytic scholar was an important reversal that demonstrated the possibilities of different, oblique approaches to pornography.
Although none of these porn studies texts deal with breakdown in a central way, they
share an important affinity for challenging existing forms, itself a kind of scholarly glitch
aesthetic. What I am suggesting here is that a glitchy porn perspective demands a rendering of a wider weave of forces that embed pornography into its complex milieux. If we are
to see how media breakdown is a useful vantage point to understand the complications of
pornography, we must first recognize that porn studies itself is a kind of technology, with a
progress narrative of innovation that directs our attention to one place or another. The
glitch, here, is what breaks from a previous form, unexpectedly and beautifully. Generative
glitchy treatments disrupt tendencies and avert our gaze to new vistas. For these reasons I
do not shy away from assigning a special status to the moment of breakdown in porn
viewing. Taking pornography seriously means that we must also take its breakdown
seriously. Something is certainly different with breakdown. Now how can we name it?
Where you come in
When we speak about audiences, we inevitably find ourselves wrestling with the question
of ‘representativeness’. We imagine a pucker-lipped reader protesting with agita: ‘But
where are the data? Who have you spoken to? How do you know?’ These are important
points to linger on because in this case the subject might not be truly known, least of
all to the subject himself who cannot remember what media breakdown was like in the
moment, whose experience of media rupture might exist as an inaccessible residue of frustration. The distance we assume must be necessary between the one doing the investigation and the thing under investigation is suddenly skewed, thrown into disarray,
frustrated.
In response to these important objections about a project like this, I respond with an
expressive feature that illuminates the question of representation by inverting the usual
conventions of address in scholarly writing. Where usually we write in the ‘for-anyone’
model of communication described by media scholar Paddy Scannell (2000), here I
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PORN STUDIES
5
write in the ‘for-someone’ model. In the following sections, each a walk down a different
path we could take to understand VHS porn breakdown, I address you and us. I address the
audience reading about the audience, collapsing conventional expectations about who is
listening and what is being heard. It is designed as an invocation. I am implicating you. I
ask: does something ring true here? Or does it breeze by like an overheard conversation?
Jean-François Lyotard has modelled this intervention for us. In the opening of Le Différend he writes: ‘You are informed that human beings endowed with language were placed
in a situation such that none of them is now able to tell about it’ (1988, 3). By using the
second person, Lyotard is already suggesting a necessary reassembling of the rhetorical
relationships we have to use to talk about instances, testimony after the Holocaust
being Lyotard’s starting point, where speech is impossible in existing idioms. I want to
channel a similar malleability in attempting to account for what slips through the
cracks. I submit, anxiously, that the success in this endeavour to uncover porn breakdown
might be measured not in the confidence of some methodological tack (a tack Champagne would say has failed if it has gained any confidence at all), but in whether you
see some place where the light is getting in.
Wear as an axis of analysis
Historians of technology often begin their research by attempting to lay out the ‘sociotechnical systems’ that circumscribe and assign values to certain technologies. Actors of
all kinds, according to this perspective, torque and pressure the development process
that eventually stabilizes how a technology circulates and is used. This approach to the
VHS is often invoked in what Joshua Greenberg (2008) calls ‘the canonical history of the
VCR’ in his book From Betamax to Blockbuster. This history recognizes three distinct but
overlapping histories of the medium: one involves the device’s ability to time-shift television, one involves the VCR’s interface with video cameras to create home movies, and one
involves the capacity to watch films and other pre-recorded content (2008, 3–4).
The first use was most publicly debated when the VHS debuted, but it is the last use that
interests us most here. As VHS and Betamax battled each other and the entertainment
industry over the legality of time-shifting television, consumers were also making
decisions about the technical-aesthetic dimensions of each format. While much attention
was paid to highly visible battles about Hollywood’s products, users at home were using
their VCRs for more than just the capacity to record television. They were also purchasing
pre-recorded films to be played at home and these were not Hollywood’s beloved
blockbusters. Pornography was some of the first material to be watched on a VCR.1
The first advertisements in national gay magazines began appearing in mid-1979. Take,
for example, one that ran in Gay News in October 1979. It is an ‘introductory offer’ from
Magnavox for a six-hour video cassette recorder. There is a black and white illustration
of the device with four blank tapes next to it (‘Retail Value Over $100.00’). The recorder
and the included tapes sell for $785.00.2 This advert is hailing the viewer to think of the
VCR as a time-shifting technology for television: ‘You can watch one program while you
tape another on a different channel. Whether you’re asleep, busy or out for the
evening, you’ll never have to miss another TV program.’ But in the same issue on page
14, a different advert includes the names of ‘pre-recorded video movies’ and mentions
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that the full selection is ‘too numerous to list’. These different uses of the VHS being advertised, however, do not tell us how the VHS was actually used.
Because I am interested here in how early VHS users brought porn home before Hollywood, I take not the socio-technical approach, but another also given by the history of
technology: an attention to the material cultural history of the VHS, one that tries to
approximate what it was like to hold pornography, to place it in the VCR dock, to watch
the lid close as the tape descends into the player. Also, most importantly, one that tells
us about what kind of wear the tape could endure, what kind of love it could handle.
You go to your local video store.3 You rent a video for $2 or $3, more if it is rare or in
high demand as some of the fetish tapes are.4 You get back to your apartment and open
the box to find the tape covered in lube. You grab a rag, rub away as much as possible,
checking to make sure none got under the lid. If it did, the tape might do what is described
as the ‘wow and flutter’, when the tape feeds across the read heads at inconsistent speeds
(Brenner 1986, 227). The video speeds up and slows down at random intervals.
When you brought your first VHS tape home, you had to reckon with what we might call
the problem of the ‘third hand’. Your living room was not preordained with ideal viewing
conditions like the theatre is. You remember the set-up to view 35 mm projection slides, a
format often advertised in porn catalogues of the 1970s: load the slides into the projector
tray, lock the tray onto its base, turn on the machine, dim the lights, open the screen or
find a suitable blank wall, aim and focus the projector, and find a place to sit. Even if
you had a remote to change the slides, you were nonetheless compelled to use at least
one hand to manage your viewing when you probably would have preferred to have
both for the real task at hand, the point of all the set-up. What was necessary was a
third hand.
The VHS seemed to help things. Viewing happened directly through the television,
albeit with some added cables. By the time the VCR was attainable for more than just
the upper class in the early 1980s, the black box had gotten blacker. The machine literally
grabbed the tape from your hand and closed its lid to shield its entrails from view. The
heads that read the tape learned to align themselves (‘tracking’) and the images simply
appeared. There were remotes and those remotes could be put down.
You notice small letters on the tape: ‘EP’. You ask the video store clerk about this next
time to see him/her. She/he tells you it is an ‘extended play’ tape with a longer recording
time and better quality. It can be rented upwards of 150 times before the tape starts to
warp and stretch and tear.5
But not if you leave the tape out in the sweltering heat of a summer afternoon. The
polyester binder that makes up the tape in the VHS box warps and shrinks with the
heat (Brenner 1986, 24). It warps and shrinks with moisture too, so a hot and humid
day is even more dangerous. It helps that your VCR player alerts you with a ‘dew
warning’ if it detects too much moisture on the tape. If the binder in the tape breaks
down, however, you get what is called a ‘sticky shed’ (Greiner 2004, 219). Pieces of the
tape get left on the reading heads in the VCR player and you are more likely to pull out
the tape from its deck and find that its shiny entrails are now spooling out as you pull.
Before you returned the tape, you took it out of the player in a hurry. You forgot to
rewind it, which means you have left it off right where you got yourself off. It will cost
you $1 when you drop it off, and now you have given the clerk a small glimpse into
your favourite part, a taste for what you are into.
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These kinds of considerations contribute to what we might call the VHS tape’s ‘wear’. I
suggest that ‘wear’ might be a useful category for thinking through porn breakdown, particularly helpful with VHS because the most loved, most watched parts of the tape are susceptible to more damage. It is the unwatched parts that stick around the longest, which
makes us think of filmic scenes as commodities that can be ‘used up’, as it were. When
we think of media in terms of wear, we think of them as love-objects. To be worn down
is to be used, to be given meanings through use, to be made useless, in the end, by
loving use. In this way, VHS tapes might come to resemble the washed-out jeans that
pull and rip in the places they most touch your skin. Or, they might resemble a sex toy
that requires the ‘care’ described by ‘care instructions’. Thinking of a ‘wear analysis’
allows us to link some essential analytical spheres, particularly media materiality with
use history.
We go to the archive, ready to perform a wear analysis. We lift the VHS tape off the shelf.
We inspect its outer parts for deterioration. We play the tape to inspect the unexposed
parts, at least those essential for viewing. We note where the tracking cannot be found
or where the quality changes. We examine the details of this tape’s donation, making
sure to parse out any evidence of degradation that happened in the archive from our
analysis of wear caused by the user. We think of relationships between moments of
wear on the tape and the consumption practices of viewing. We notice, let us say, that
the come shots are intact but scenes with most dialogue are stretched, which leads us
to think of what Richard Dyer meant by ‘self-reflexivity’ in gay porn: being turned on
more ‘by the thought of the cameras, crew and me in attendance’ than by the images
of fucking because the reminder of ‘a real life setting that had really to exist in order to
be filmable’ implicates you as an ‘unobserved observer’ (1994, 50–51). We might think,
too, of what Tim Stuettgen wrote of mainstream pornography: ‘[W]e face the representational promise of the ultimate construction of the truth that this sex just is’ (2007, 253;
original emphasis). Perhaps it is time for a close reading.
Apparatus of intimate frustration
Let us assume that you experience frustration when your porn stops working. Let us say
that frustration is the experience of disappointment by a mechanism that seems controllable, the effect of a plan that spuriously balks. Let us assume that this experience is not
available through description for the frustrated subject. How can we gain access to this
frustration?
We could turn to apparatus theory if what we are after is an account of sense-memories
that are likely lodged in the minds of VHS porn users. If we take as given what Laura
Mulvey says in her seminal essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ – that ‘the fascination of film is reinforced by pre-existing patterns of fascination already at work within the
individual subject and the social formations that have moulded him’ (1975, 22) – then frustration is something primordial that gets divined under certain conditions. If we want to
know what it felt like to have a tape spit out its coils at a climax, either of the film or of
the viewer or both, then we should get attuned to ‘the impact of the technical and physical
specificity of watching films on the processing methods used by their watchers’, as Toby
Miller (2000, 403) has written in his introduction to apparatus theory.
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However, apparatus theory as it was formulated by its most well-known forebear, JeanLouis Baudry, does not assign a special status to the material technologies involved. The
‘apparatus’ in ‘apparatus theory’ is the psychoanalytic and phenomenological hardware
that links the material technologies of film with culture writ large. In his essay ‘Ideological
Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus’, Baudry sketches a number of essential
areas of inquiry for cinema studies to focus more practically on the ‘field of the signified’
and the ‘influences’ of media by considering the ‘technical bases on which these effects
depend’ (1974–5, 40). Baudry’s list of an apparatus’s under-theorized features makes
clear that specific technical conditions must be in place in order for film to be the ‘ideological machine’ that much of cinema studies is concerned with. In emphasizing ideological effect as a configuration, then, we see how the material conditions of
pornography are at once insufficient for providing a strong account of viewer experience
(because the true apparatus is the relation between the technology and culture) yet
essential in determining the conditions for a viewing’s effect (because the images
cannot function without their means of reproduction). This suggests that a glitch in
filmic reproduction reduces the potential of the image-sequence to its necessary technical basis; any concern about pornography’s ideological machinery begins only if the
pornography plays right.
Franklin Melendez has taken up the charge to examine the ‘material basis of the
medium’ (2004, 402) as it relates to video in particular. In his essay, ‘Video Pornography,
Visual Pleasures, and the Return of the Sublime’, Melendez proposes studying technical
specificity of porn as a way to combat the perceived transhistorical and homogeneous
nature of pleasure and visuality. In doing so, he considers how the gaze obtains a corporeal
heft, what Jonathan Crary calls the ‘carnal density of vision’ (1992, 149). In his essay we see
the shadow of a hand pressed against a televisions screen that shows a still from Naked
Highway, a film that, Melendez argues, incorporates the material conditions of video
into its editing and production. The haptic sense of sight – that your hand might reach
out and touch the screen – is one way that the video apparatus hails to the viewer.
Absent in Melendez’s discussion, however, is a consideration of the rupture of this
hailing, when the gaze’s ‘carnal density’ is interrupted by an error.
Perhaps, however, a focus on an isolatable, definite moment of rupture assumes that
frustration can be localized to technical fault, as indeed our troubleshooting instincts
compel us to do. Perhaps there is trouble for this kind of troubleshooting if frustration
is not an event but a structure. Paul Preciado ([2008] 2013), in his book Testo Junkie:
Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era, proposes what he calls ‘potentia gaudendi’ as a lynchpin for understanding how the excitable body moved from the
centre of political action in the late nineteenth century to become the object of feverish
governmental and industrial management. Potentia gaudendi is an ‘“orgasmic force”, the
(real or virtual) strength of a body’s (total) excitation’ ([2008] 2013, 41). He goes on, ‘Orgasmic force is the sum of the potential for excitation inherent in every material molecule’
([2008] 2013, 42). It is the capitalistic management of potentia gaudendi through the development of synthetic sex hormones and the mutability of highly-mediated bodies that
allows Preciado to offer ‘pornpower’ and ‘pharmacopower’ as dominant frames through
which sexuality gets figured.
Potentia gaudendi is also what allows him to frame all of pornography in terms of frustration: ‘The purpose of porn’, he writes, ‘as is that for sexual work, is the production of
PORN STUDIES
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frustrating satisfaction’ ([2008] 2013, 304). The system of excitation takes the shape of a
boomerang:
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[P]leasure-in-the-desubjectification-of-the-other/pleasure-in-the-desubjectification-of-theself: watching a subject that can’t control the force of its sexual production (potential guadendi) and seeing it at the very moment it renounces that force, to the benefit of an all-powerful spectator (oneself, the person who is watching) who, in turn, and through the
representation, sees him- or herself desubjectified, reduced to a masturbatory response.
The one watching is pleasured by his or her own process of desubjectification. ([2008] 2013,
270; original emphasis)
Thus Preciado refers to porn’s ‘excitation–frustration–excitation’ structure as a way of
naming the cycle that gives pleasure and power to the viewer while revoking them at
the same time. This leads Preciado to an important point about the role of the individual
in this system, one that he makes by invoking the second person:
I have no need to remind you – not you, who are reading this book – that the province of sex
(and I mean your sex) is not the individual body (your body) or the private domain (your
private domain) or any domestic space (your domestic space). ([2008] 2013, 273; original
emphasis)
By speaking directly to us and also to a more general, plural ‘you’, Preciado stresses the
‘pornpower’ that wends bodies through a global flow of capital and labour. When we
think of frustration, then, how can we think of it as a moment? How can it be specified
as an occurrence in an individual location?
You rent The Other Side of Aspen.6 You watch it at home at first, but you would rather
have company. You imagine the inside of your house as a ski lodge. You try to think up
who might star in the orgy, delighted by the possibility that if they were to join you
right now, there would be nothing in the way of enacting on the bed what you see on
the screen. You fast-forward through the tape thinking on this. The images scramble on
the screen and then disappear. You take the tape out of the player and lift up the lid.
Nothing seems to be wrong, but when you insert the tape into the deck again, no
images appear. A dull whine comes from the player and you think you might be doing
damage. You turn off the television and you turn to some porn catalogues you got in the
mail, you guess because you are on a list from the production house where you bought
your last VHS. The catalogues work well in lieu of the video. You return the tape to the
rental store the next day and you do not hear about it again. A month later when you
see the tape on the shelf again, you cannot remember if you have seen that one before.
Inarticulacies
Breakdown is hard to engineer. Partly because of this, we cannot simply ask people how
many times their tapes broke. This would be cutting the Gordian knot when the questions
demand more oblique entrées. How can we talk to someone about his porn breakdown,
then? Is it possible to conduct an interview about porn’s technological failure in a methodologically sound way? Or is frustration destined to be only ever a series of inarticulacies?
You hear from a friend who volunteers at a gay bookstore in town that there is a guy
who has hundreds of gay VHS tapes. He volunteers at the bookstore too, it turns out, and
you stop by to see him. He is a delightfully cheery and funny man in his early 80s. He
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K. GOTKIN
gleefully shows you his master list of the VHS porn collection when you mention you want
to talk about his tapes.7 You tell him you want to know what it was like in the early years to
experience VHS tapes at home for the first time. You set up a time to visit his house, about
a half-hour away at the very last stop on the subway.
You walk into an archive, as the man jokes about how some people see him as a messy
hoarder and others as a meticulous preservationist. You ask him to walk you through his collection and he starts with the clean stuff. He shows you his sunny reading den, lined with
walls of books and records and audio tapes that wrap around in alphabetical order. He
shows you his living room with his VCR set up. ‘And this is what is called the dining
room’, he says, ‘but of course it isn’t a dining room as if you could dine in it’. Almost every
surface is covered with piles of artefacts. ‘It’s very hard to get rid of things’, he says.
He shows you more rooms with more books and magazines and albums. Then he takes
you upstairs. At the top of the stairs you see the start of his about 4500 VHS tapes. Then he
shows you his closet. Stacked neatly from floor to ceiling, in alphabetical order, are the pornographic tapes. ‘Basically, we start with The Abduction and end with Zulu or whatever.’
You ask him when he first started collecting. He cannot remember exactly, but sometime
in the early 1980s. You ask him when he stopped collecting. He says only a few years ago,
but that he still records things from television onto VHS. You ask if he has shown this collection to a lot of people. He says some people will reach out to him from time to time, but
he mostly just sends videos to friends who ask to borrow from the collection. He has been
interviewed a few times about his collecting habits, but not many people have asked
about his porn collection.8
You ask if the tapes have preserved well, a slight nudge toward breakdown. He says he
has not had much trouble, but maybe that is because he has not watched many of them in
a while and the other ones have not been played enough to put major strain on the tape.
And anyway, ‘if one of them self destructs, there are others’.
You ask about some of his favourite tapes. He mentions a film called Big Guns from 1987
that was a take on Top Gun. You ask how many more times he has watched this tape than
the others. He has seen all of them at least once, but he has watched this one more like 15
times. He cannot remember exactly.
You ask to watch Big Guns with him. You say you want to see what the images look like
and see the VCR set-up he has downstairs. You mention it must be nice not to have to rely
on spotty internet connections with the VHS because you can just pop them in and have
them ready to go.9 He seems pleased you are understanding why he loves these tapes.
‘People say LPs sound better than CDs but I never believed that.’
He puts the tape in the VCR and for about 10 seconds nothing happens. There is a blank
screen and he is saying maybe he needs to rewind or maybe he has done something
wrong in the set-up. But then the FBI message comes on, warning that the material
should not be shown to minors and should not be illegally copied.
The man explains to you that he loves this film because the storylines seem believable.
The actors really seem to enjoy the fucking and the acting is not cheesy. He says he
watches the tapes all the way through; he does not fast forward to the fucking. It is the
momentum he likes.
You realize almost immediately that there is vertical image bending on the top two or
three inches of the video. The top seems to slide off to the side. You ask him about this.
‘Sometimes there’s a little funniness on there.’ He says it does not bother him. You ask why.
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PORN STUDIES
11
He says it probably bothers the younger guys because they have come to expect crystal
clear images in their porn, but he was raised with a grainier media environment. To him,
there is really not much difference in quality between DVDs and VHS tapes. He is gesturing
at the screen so you can see. Is it not good, he seems to ask?
You ask about tracking. He says it is never really a problem. Only momentary, if it
happens at all. You ask about warping of the tape. Has he ever played a tape so many
times that it starts to wear down? That is never a problem for him, but you sense that
his assiduous archival instincts would compel him to keep his viewing times in the safe
margin. For example, he has purchased this title on DVD because he loves it so much,
obviating the breakdown you are concerned about.
You sit together watching some of his favourite fucking scenes. There is nothing wrong
with the tape from what you can tell. It seems to work fine.
What does this interview reveal? It seems, at first blush, not much. But if breakdown is
not something that needs to be seen and heard to be understood because it is in fact what
cocoons how all media work, this interview in fact adds some interesting depth to how
porn works.
This interview reveals an important media essentialism at the heart of the man’s interactions with his tapes. His avoidance of glitches is more than just an attempt to remove
pesky momentary obstacles from the fore. He indeed sees the essence of his pornography
to be deeper, somewhere below the surface-level imperfections that all media have. Thus
when he says younger viewers today are too picky to watch the tapes he enjoys, he is
subtly critiquing a notion of technological innovation that places too much emphasis
on negligible technical advancements. The most important thing is there all along: the
acting, the fucking, the real people in front of the real cameras, the electric sex that is
not endangered by a few glitches here and there.
This illustrates what sound studies scholar Jonathan Sterne would call the ‘mediation
thesis’ in the early history of the home entertainment industry’s discourse of reproduction
and fidelity. The thesis posits that there is an important ‘unmediated sonic reality prior to
sound’s technology mediation’ (2003, 285) that becomes the standard against which listeners should engage with sonic technology. This logic is ultimately about the enduring
fantasy of the medium’s own erasure when ‘the medium produces a perfect symmetry
between copy and original’ (2003, 285). Sound scholar Caleb Kelly has convincingly
shown this thesis, while supremely useful, to be ultimately fallacious; instead, what Kelly
calls practices of ‘cracked media’ show that ‘mediation itself has become the object of
sound creation, composition, and performance’ (2009, 31). Nonetheless, the user has
often been trained, as we can see in this interview, to ignore the noise according to the
mediation thesis’s encouragement to imagine a pristine original media object buried
under the glitchy copy. When the interviewee looks past the glitch, it is an unadulterated
tape he imagines exists beyond or beneath.
Although the interview failed to observe breakdown as it happened and could not
access frustration even obliquely, it demonstrates that breakdown is contingent on a
user’s tolerance for a glitch aesthetic and also his preservation practices. In this particular
interview, what made frustration inaccessible was the subject’s excellent archival habits,
but also his tolerance for the image bending. For others, this would be distracting, evidence that the medium is obsolete and full of noise. But breakdown, we find, is not a
rigid frame from user to user and from video to video. This further compels us to find
12
K. GOTKIN
breakdown not as a particular moment, even though a fascination with the moment of
breakdown is what motivates this article. Instead, we find a web of forces at work in sleuthing after what we thought was something discrete.
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Conclusion: blue-balling media studies
Simply trying to triangulate the frustration of VHS breakdown is not enough because there
is nothing simple about this endeavour, as if three approaches (deceptively fixed coordinates) would give us perfect clarity. Finding John Champagne’s ‘wide weave of forces’
around porn means that when you pull on one thread, many more come with it. That
porn has a long vanishing point situated among its many contiguous social phenomena
also leads us to a realization about method. A one-time calibration of porn analysis is not
enough. Glitchy porn requires a process of recurrent methodological renewal, where new
analytical practices are tried and tested as the faithful ones no longer bear fruit. There is
a sense in this process of being blue-balled, of being taken somewhere to find out your
plan has balked. But being blue-balled here is not the sense of failure, but perhaps a necessary compulsion to find a new program. This, we find, is how you troubleshoot porn studies.
Although we often measure the utility of mean by what we accomplish with them, our
end products conceal the frustrations that intermittently but persistently occlude our
efforts. The celluloid melts, the cathode ray tube sparks, the VHS tape warps and stretches.
To match the disruptive potential of the glitches in our porn on our everyday uses of porn,
our scholarship must take these glitches seriously, considering how we might glitch our
own analytical frames by focusing on what does not work and what cannot be disciplined.
Broken porn presents good problems for us, through which we learn much about the
normal and successful porn that dominates the scholarly record.
But as this article has attempted to enact, broken porn compels us to move away from
imagining ‘porn’ as a set of discrete objects to a view of the interactive processes that orbit
around these objects. These orbits cannot be understood from a fixed vantage point, since
the scholar’s view from above is often a view from nowhere, removed so fundamentally
from the iterative complexities and negotiations within assemblages of significance that
any attempt to capture them is almost surely obsolete the moment it is written. An expansive, glitchy porn studies, then, ends not where it thinks there can be a conclusion, but
with a call to diffuse our knowledge claims.
Think so?
Notes
1. Jonathan Coopersmith (1998) has written about this generalized sex-first use theory of many
kinds of media in ‘Pornography, Technology, and Progress’.
2. John J. Wilcox, Jr, LGBT Archives at the William Way LGBT Community Center in Philadelphia, USA.
3. Let us say the year is 1986.
4. These prices are consistent with one Philadelphia video store owner’s account. Telephone call
with author, 13 November 2013.
5. Philadelphia video store owner’s account. Telephone call with author, 13 November 2013.
6. A 1983 Falcon Studios classic, the first in a series.
7. Richard Smith, in discussion with the author, November 2013. All quotations are transcriptions
from recorded audio.
PORN STUDIES
13
8. You are trying to figure out here whether he has rehearsed this story many times. Is it a singly-told
narrative or a multiply-told one?
9. This is a strategic question, asking him to comment on the relative technical stability of his tapes.
Acknowledgements
This article benefitted from the loving pedagogy of Cindy Patton.
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