ON PORNOGRAPHY
189
of the materials of art can be construed as excluding even the most
extreme forms of consciousness that transcend social personality or
psychological individuality.
In
daily life, to be sure, we may acknowledge a moral obliga–
tion to inhibit such states of consciousness in ourselves. The obliga–
tion seems pragmatically sound. Such inhibition on the part of most
seems necessary for social order in the widest sense, and seems neces–
sary on the part of each in order to establish and maintain a humane
contact with other persons (though that contact can
be
renounced,
for shorter or longer periods). It's well known that when people
venture into the extremities of consciousness, they do so at the peril
of their sanity, that is to say, of their humanity. But the "human–
scale" or humanistic standard proper to ordinary life and conduct
seems misplaced when applied to art. It oversimplifies.
If
within the
last century art conceived as an autonomous activity has come to be
invested with an unprecedented stature-the nearest thing to a sac–
ramental human activity acknowledged by a secular society-it is
because one of the things art has elected to do is to make forays
into and take up positions on the frontiers of consciousness (often
very dangerous to the artist as a person) and to report back what's
there. Being a free-lance explorer of spiritual dangers, the artist is
given a certain license to behave differently from other people;
matching the singularity of his vocation, he mayor may not
be
decked out with a suitably eccentric life style. But his main job is
to invent trophies of his experiences-objects and gestures that fas–
cinate and enthrall, not merely (as older notions of the artist would
have it) edify or entertain. His principal means of fascinating is to
advance one step further in the dialectic of outrage. To make his
work repulsive, obscure, inaccessible; in short, to give what is, or
seems to be,
not
wanted. But however fierce may
be
the outrages he
perpetrates upon his audience, the artist's credentials and spiritual
authority ultimately depend on the audience's sense (whether some–
thing known or inferred) of the outrages he commits upon himself.
The exemplary modem artist is a broker in madness.
The notion of art as the dearly-purchased fruits of an immense
spiritual risk, one whose cost goes up with the entry and participa–
tion of each new player in the game, invites a new set of critical
standards. Certainly, the art produced under the aegis of this con·
ception is not, cannot be, "realistic." But words that merely invert
