Abstract
Paasonen’s Carnal Resonance is a critical attempt to explore, engage with, and question conceptions of online pornography. Situating itself within a media historical framework, the work focuses on the “modalities, affective intensities, and visceral and disturbing qualities” of online porn (p. 2). By framing porn in terms of affect, Paasonen draws our attention to the intersection of bodily and sensory experiences and the digital materiality of porn. This intersection, Paasonen demonstrates, is by no means cohesive or clear but is rather prevalent with contradictions, anomalies, and surprises, thereby remaining ultimately irreducible and defying a concrete conceptual taxonomy. By doing so, she raises critical questions and concerns about our conceptions of porn, digital materiality, mediation, and current epistemological orientations within porn studies. Paasonen weaves an intricate argument by working out critical concepts with abundant examples through her clear and impactful writing. The work itself is critical, reflexive, and carefully builds its argument without dissolving into an exercise of nihilistic deconstruction or rushing into premature and convenient theorizations. It “contributes to our knowledge on the visceral appeal of porn as inseparable from its media of production and distribution” (p. 19). This inseparability of affect from modality makes issues of carnality central to the discussion of online porn specifically in terms of digital materiality and modes of production. Paasonen then proceeds to chart out some of the limitations of existing methodological orientations within porn studies and offers an alternative orientation that engages with, instead of encompassing and/or detaching itself from, the sensory, material, and affective dynamics of online porn.
Paasonen characterizes the pornographic materials analyzed in this work as mainstream heterosexual porn. She makes the case that any characterization of such material is contingent and then states that her corpus is “representative of what can be easily found and rates high in searches and visits” (p. 6). The details of the criteria and contingencies that qualify as mainstream are found wanting. Looking past this, she argues that her decision to focus on this specific category of porn is an intentional move to challenge the commonsensical and assumed characterization of mainstream heterosexual porn as “distinctly categorizable, structured, and ‘uninteresting’” (p. 7). Where Paasonen leads us, through this exercise, is to questions concerning the modalities, materiality, and affective intensities of online porn and how these are implicated in each other.
By approaching the subject matter through the lens of affect, as opposed to the predominant mode of investigation—representation—Paasonen embraces the carnal nature of porn and makes it the guiding compass of her inquiry. In porn, she states, “bodies move and move the bodies of those watching” (p. 2). In this framing, porn is irreducible to semiotic signifiers that can be neatly categorized and theorized about and it thereby poses methodological and theoretical challenges. This notion of carnality characterized as gut reactions and possessing affective stickiness, is “not necessarily easy to articulate or translate into language” (p. 17). The sensory and material refuse to be absorbed into and confined within the semiotic. This tension serves as the linchpin for Paasonen’s entire argument.
In over simplified terms, the book’s argument can be described as a critical conversation between three interrelated topics: modalities of online porn, affective dynamics of engaging with online porn (both academic and day-to-day), and the ethical concerns of interpretive methodologies used to understand and talk about the former two. By problematizing existing approaches towards the affective dynamics of online porn, Paasonen shows that the issue is not a matter of under-exploration of a certain sub-domain but is rather discursive and epistemological. Carnality is discursively “framed out” (p. 9). In an attempt to engage with and address this, she draws from new materialism, phenomenology, feminism, and queer theory and proposes the concept of resonance as a critical reimagination—a conceptual reorientation that not only recognizes the centrality of the sensory and material but also attempts to engage with it without reducing it to the confines of language.
The contribution and originality of this work lies in its ability to open up the discursive realm of online porn and digital materiality beyond the quest for meaning and representation. The epistemological commitment to pursuing ‘how does it work?’ instead of ‘what does it mean?’ drawing from Deleuze and Guattari (2009), keeps the inquiry focused on the assemblage instead of freezing the dynamics into semiotic units. In Chapter 4, Paasonen argues that existing methods such as content analysis are limiting in staying true to the above-mentioned epistemological commitment. She argues that content analysis is a “distanced form of interpretation” (p. 135) that relies not only on the clear distinction and distancing of the researcher and the researched but also on the ability of the researcher to codify and categorize the researched phenomena and is therefore inevitably reductive of the sensory and the material. In finding alternatives and additional analytical tools, she draws inspiration from reparative reading (Sedgwick, 2003) and implicated reading (Pearce, 1997) and proposes an orientation that accounts for the affective power and material forces of online porn, accommodates and relies on the proximity and interaction between the researcher and the researched, while remaining open to “ambiguity and the plurality of the material studied” (p. 136).
The resulting interpretive exercise is not a unified theory or methodology but a quilt of critical orientations that makes possible a discursive space for engaging with the sensory and the material. And it is this that makes Paasonen’s work go beyond the domain of porn studies and makes itself truly interdisciplinary and relevant for any domain of inquiry that deals with notions of materiality, embodiment, and affect. Upon setting up this discursive context, notions of hyperbole, repetition, excess, transgression, filth, disgust, and queerness within mainstream heterosexual online porn are revisited through the lens of resonance, grab, and diverse forms of looking. As a concluding remark, this work presents a sophisticated and scholarly argument whose aim is not to provide a definitive theorization or tracing the boundaries of porn but rather to imaginatively explore “novel ways of conceptualizing the genre and its online variants” (p. 29). And that it does.