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By Root 1003 0

a more and more realistic image of a visual deception. By this irony, the images come ever closer to revealing that, wouldn’t you know it, the bodysnatchers on the screen aren’t really dismembering and inhabiting the body of that pretty mother-of-four. With HDTV, you can see clearly that those are men in rubber suits and makeup, and she’s not really a blonde, she’s wearing a wig. The irony is that as the quality of the visual reproduction increases, its ability to deceive you is destroyed. But the deception that has been lost was once, and is ostensibly still, the goal of both the filmmaker and the viewer. Like HDTV, pornography is a simulation of a sex that no one has ever had, and it is in ever more real depictions. This is what Baudrillard calls hyperreal.

As hyperreal, pornography can be understood as “the endless over-signification of a real that no longer exists, and of a body that never existed” (p. 33). As we’re perpetually bombarded with pornography’s version of sex, we forget that it isn’t at all related to an experience of sex that anyone has ever had. Baudrillard asserts that this forgetting over time establishes an entire culture of hyperreality, as we develop simulations that are further and further from experience but with no ability to remember that they are not actually referring back to reality at all. Eventually, we achieve a repeated simulation of a thing that never existed in the first place, the hyperreal.

We can call this vision of sex a simulacrum, “a truth effect that hides the truth’s non-existence” (p. 35), as this anatomy-determined simulation of sex is all that we can remember at this point. Pornography claims by its existence there must be sex like this somewhere, since it is the caricature and simulation of that sex, but this reveals that it is only a simulacrum of the truthless sex we inherited from the Enlightenment’s reduction. And this reduction is not just found in pornography, but pornography is its most revealing simulation.

This is the entire troubled story of sex in this age, once mysterious and now rapidly approaching the hyperreal. This is the lament of “Bodysnatchers,” as it paints for us an image of the ironic bodiless pornographic simulation extending beyond the borders of the screen and a vision of the new hyperreal body that simulation produces, a lie:

You killed the sound

Removed backbone

A pale imitation with the edges sawn off

They got a skin and they put me in

On the lines wrapped round my face

Are for anyone else to see

I’m a lie

But if Baudrillard is right and the deterministic body is outstripped by seduction, where then is seduction’s foothold? Seduction belongs to the world of aesthetics, and as such, belongs to the world of deception and appearances. The physical bodies must be transfigured into signs. What we have is a symbolic, not anatomical, fate.

You Paint Yourself White

Whereas pornography breaks the Natural Laws of the real it claims to simulate by creating the hyperreal and simulating an unreal, seduction eschews the real for the sake of the arbitrary artifice, the sign. Deception is one of its most powerful tools.

Among the arbitrary artifices of sex, none is more compelling than the body. Nudity, presence, even touch are not actions or objects but signifiers, because in the world of seduction, the body is not a means of accumulation or production but a sign among signs. And “the power of signs lies in their appearance and disappearance; that is how they efface the world” (p. 94). Even unreservedly arbitrary things like wearing cosmetics become intimately vital in the game of seduction for Baudrillard, for they create even more layers of artifice and secrecy. In seduction, the body itself becomes a fluid artifice, transfigured into a mere sign, stripped “Nude.”

Now that you’ve found it it’s gone

Now that you feel it you don’t

As an offspring of the sphere of the aesthetic, seduction belongs to the world of immediacy and surface. This means that the signs of seduction are not concerned necessarily with meaning but rather with the