Echt of nep? Een tropologische benadering van hardcore porno. Tropologisch? What the fuck? PoMoTaal?

I am working on a project that aims to apply a tropological analysis on the example of the works of Paul de Man, to a variety of postmodern visual narrative forms, primarily hardcore pornography and advertising. The project takes as its point of departure a pivotal work of Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending, which discusses how mankind has made use of notions of an end of history to strike up fictitious concords between the past, the present, and the future. It is a distinctive feature of this narrative pattern that the significance of each of its episodes is determined by its relation to the structure as a whole, and that it accords a special significance to the ending of the story, insisting that the significance of any given narrative episode can only be determined in relation to this ending. Kermode importantly charts the transformation of an imminent into an immanent conception of the ending that sets in with the Renaissance and can be traced right up to modern writers such as Sartre and Beckett.

My study is primarily concerned with another permutation of our sense of an ending, namely the transformation of immanence into immediacy. Whereas the ending in the former view marks a sense of spiritual crisis, in the latter view the ending is simply seen as a material object. It is a working hypothesis of the present project that this crucial permutation is largely co-extensive with a shift from modernity to postmodernity, and furthermore, that it can best be studies in the narrative forms which are, if not unique to, then at least distinctive of the present phase of history. The project advances hardcore cinematic pornography as the archetypal example of a narrative form in which an immediate sense of an ending is operating. It goes on to argue that what is essential to this hardcore sense of an ending, is not that it is tied to an explicit representation of sexual activity, but that it leads the viewer, or reader, of porn to conclude that the ending corresponds to a material conception of meaning. Furthermore, it argues that another distinctive trait of pornography is that it suggests that this material meaning is directly available to us, that is, that we do not have to engage in act of interpretation to have access to it.

My paper pays special attention to the rhetorical function of the cum-shot in hardcore porn, which can be seen to have the effect of blurring the line between fiction and reality, and goes on to describe how similar rhetorical effects are achieved in advertising.