ABSTRACT
Obscenity relates, first and foremost, to ‘the loss of scene,’ and all that this notion implied (Baudrillard 1993b, 62; cf. Virilio 1991). ‘The “scene” ’, as Baudrillard suggests (1993b, 61), amounts to the ‘possibility of creating a space where things can transform themselves, to play in another way, and not at all in their objective determination’. It is ‘an enchanted space’, a space which ‘is arbitrary and that does not make sense from the point of view of conventional space’ (ibid.). The scene is, in other words, ‘a space of freedom from convention and a space that one can take a distance from in order to put oneself outside the realm of … determinations rather than be overwhelmed, swept over, incapacitated or drowned’ (Bauman 2002, 280). It creates room for manoeuvre by creating a ‘perfectly capricious division of space’ (Baudrillard 1993b, 62), thus allowing for something to take place – though not something that might be predicted and planned in advance (as in the case of production: pro-ducere). Rather, the scene is given over to the power of illusion, in precisely the same way that play, being unconstrained by reality, is given over to illusion. Play, as we have previously noted (Chapter 3), is never unconstrained as such. On the contrary, it necessarily takes place according to the rules of the game. Yet the rule, unlike the law, is an ineluctably arbitrary form: ‘pleasure comes when one cuts up very arbitrarily a kind of terrain where one permits play in any possible fashion, in another way, where one will be outside the real, outside the stupid realistic constraints of conventional space’ (ibid.). The scene, therefore, relates to illusion in a pure, aesthetic sense: in terms of the ‘art of appearance … of making things appear. Not producing them, but making them appear’ or conjuring them up (ibid., 55). Politics, in its pure form, related to the power of illusion, as did the notion of utopia. The eruption of the obscene, however, implies that there is no longer any room for manoeuvre: it amounts to ‘a power of disillusion and of objectivity’ (ibid., 60). Being marked by ‘the total promiscuity of things’, the obscene ‘destroys distance’ and ‘doesn’t recognize rules any more’ (ibid.). For Bauman (2002, 280), obscenity suggests
a dense crowd inside which nothing can be seen at a distance, examined and contemplated; no place to breathe freely and take a longer breath, pause and ponder, see what is what and what one could do to make it into something else.
