Foucault, agency and ecoporn

In Bart Welling's article on ecoporn he makes the argument that pornography and depictions of nature as represented in the media share many similarities.  For Welling ecoporn and greenwashing are the same concept. Greenwashing being, "Disinformation disseminated by an organization, etc., so as to present an environmentally responsible public image" (Welling 54).  In the same way that the pornographic industry profits off of the marginalization of women and in turn creates a mentality of abuse, ecopornographers greenwash the public by playing upon their emotions and showing them images that will placate them into a sense of ease.  According to Welling Ecoporn and "traditional" pornography share three similarities:

1. "Ecoporn perpetuates ways of seeing feminized Others that have been instrumental in facilitating countless acts of violent expropriation."
2. "Ecoporn places the viewer in the role of the "male surveyor," the all seing male subject to Nature's unseeing aestheticized female object." 
3. "Finally, Ecoporn is pornographic because, it has been moving in recent years beyond images of flesh colored landscapes.... to a truly hardcore obsession with explicit sexuality and the violent, microscopically examined" (58, 59).

What I wanted to discuss was the role of agency and in turn Michel Foucaults concept of power through discourse in this article.  In the paragraph regarding the second comparison, Welling says, "The role of ecopornopgraphic vision [denies] the capacity for active, independent vision-and, by extension, other kinds of agency-to nonhuman life-forms" (58). Welling is making the assertion that by imposing this vision on the other life forms it negates the other courses of action that could be taken that are contrary to the more dominant discourse.  This ties in to Focault's concept of power within discourse.  Because the discourse is being dominated by those who are distributing the ecoporn, their suppression of the agency of their opponents is possible.  In this case, it is the agency of those who recognize that they are being spoon fed images of an unrealistic natural world for the sake of their own superiority.

What's interesting is that Welling acknowledges the shifts within the discourse and how those who are perpetuating ecoporn adapt to these trends.  He says, "We are content to see nature (temporarily) occupy the superior position without interrogating the deeper imbalances and schisms at the heart of how we represent, see, and live in the world" (60).  The problem beneath the representation is our desire to dominate over nature that has been fed to us by the controlling discourse of the time.


Works Cited:

Foucault, Michel. “What Is an Author?” The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, Third Edition. Ed. David H. Richter. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martins, 2007. 904-914.

Welling, Bart H. “Ecoporn: On the Limits of Visualizing the Nonhuman.” Ecosee: Image, Rhetoric,
Nature. Ed. Sidney Dobrin and Sean Morey. Albany: State U of New York P, 2009. 53-77.