So, I’ve been completely banned from Instagram for posting unappropriate sexual contents (even if I was already censoring most of them). To those who were following me you still can check some previews of my work here : https://www.lensculture.com/arnaud-mery
First I’d like to say it’s too much of an honor to know that the benevolent hero(s) who signaled me (or is it the Hal 9000 algorithm itself ?) considered me as a threat to public safety. Unfortunately I’m still very far from being as subversive as Sade, not to say totally harmless. This excessive but ordinary sanction is of course purely hypocritical when we know how many obscenities are legaly allowed to be posted every day on these kind of websites. It only shows how much the Instagram/Facebook type of puritanism isn’t at all a parody of the theocratic ages, but really the core of today’s enslavement. Only not for the same reasons than those of the bigots.
The social networks are splitted in two main territories drawing a clear line between the platforms where you show that you obediently belong to society (by showing your rituals of consumption, supporting preconceived opinions, following news) and the ones where you pretend to break the daily routine, mainly by being sexually transgressive. These two categories have a name already : the first one is « SafeForWork » (SFW), the second one « NotSafeForWork » (NSFW). In other words : Facebook vs. Fetlife, Youtube vs Youporn, Instagram vs. Pornostagram…
In contrast to the traditional regimes, modern societies can’t maintain their authority only by imposing a consistent dogma on people, even by force. Precisely because today, anyone knows that any conception of the world, any truth about life, or any social organisation, are built on fictions, and not on a real essence hidden behind things like religion could have been. To resolve this unability to beleive in great cosmological narratives anymore, capitalism found in compulsive self-enjoyment an inconsistent but natural substitute. Thus the compulsive proliferation of personnal stories became the ritual replacing the prayers, and seeking the monopole of self-enjoyment became the ultimate achievement instead of holiness.The whole moralism of this world can be stated as follow : SELL YOURSELF SO YOU'LL DESERVE THE RIGHT TO ENJOY YOUR… SELF.
And that’s why false sexual transgressions are now crucial to make this system work as a dogma. Because they allow its frustrated servants, forced to satisfy the few people who monopolize self-enjoyment while they barely can enjoy themselves, to sustain an illusion of freedom. To overproduce tons of useless goods and services to serve the capital's greed requires a lot more convicing reward than an afterlife in paradise. This is where the transgressive perversions are a very efficent way to enrol the disenchanted slaves of today.
This puritanism/falsy-transgressive-perversion couple is what keeps real subversion away from today’s sexuality by maintaining people in a purely narcissistic satisfaction of themselves, without risking any unexpected encounters or real adventures that could intrude the safety of their daily routine. Whether as an advertiser of « your-self » selling his experiences and unquestionned convictions for a bit of « likes », « loves » or money, or as a pervert fullfilling his fantaisies as he planned it, it’s the same individualistic dogma that is performed. On the sfw platforms the individual is taken into account in a autoritarian way, urging him to obey strict rules, to follow the news, and to feed the Market. On the nsfw ones it’s the individual that takes the platforms into account in a falsy trangressive way which is a purely perverse one. It’s the entertainment side of the capitalistic slavery, the big playground where you satisfy one desire after the other according to your mood, whether by switching between very well selected partners from a dating site or by switching between porn videos according to the fantaisy you have, or by switching between gender labels on your profile as it pleases you.
The limit of all that is that sex, neither life in general, can’t be reduced to a catalogue of perversions waiting to be fulfilled. For instance, the frictions and the hysteria sexual encounters potentially bring push the subject to go beyond the ego expectation or the confort zone of its idiosyncratic familiarities, to question the structure of his own fantaisies as much as the ones of his partners. That’s what the proto-facist regime we live in wants to avoid at all costs. The true sexual emancipation is a real subversive threat to the individualistic ideology. Nothing to do with the parody of it staged by the sfw / nsfw couple in which we are confined. The growing lack of radical frictions, hysteria or angst in social networks compelled to hypocritical tolerance, perversions and narcissistic enjoyment will soon or later reach a point of saturation and things will blow.
The so called « wild capitalism » has never been wild at all. And we can see how more and more autoritarian is becoming it’s regulation through the way it tries to deal with sexuality by domesticating it’s real wildness and imposing patterns that wont get your precious career compromised.
What we need more than ever is a modernity encouraging true transgressions.
What we need more than ever is a modernity encouraging true transgressions.
