2005, "Guy Bourdin: Soft core and the propositional truth," EGS

What discourse must fight against is not so much the unconscious secret as the superficial abyss of its own appearance; and if discourse must triumph over something, it is not over fantasies and hallucinations heavy with meaning and misinterpretation, but the shiny surface of non-sense and all the games that the latter renders possible.
- Jean Baudrillard, Seduction, 1979

Nothing of the truth, in its authentic sense, remains accessible if we allow that the phenomenon of truth occurs in the proposition.
-Alain Badiou, Infinite Thought, 2003

I. Soft Core
Commercial photographer Garry Gross photographed Brooke Shields as a child, standing nude in a bathroom. The photograph was taken with permission from the actress's agent-mother but when rights to the photograph became a legal debate, the image became a site of public voyeurism. In 1983, Richard Prince re-photographed the image of the child star and enshrined it in a New York gallery space called Spiritual America. The name was borrowed from a 1923 Alfred Stieglitz photograph of a horse with castrated genitals, commenting on the cultural lack of the United States. Prince's Spiritual America appeared at a time when the president was an ex-movie star, when American culture equaled Hollywood. And while his photograph showcases 80's celebrity culture, it does so with an ideal classical form and pose. The relationship between the photo's historical significance and its timeless nude form contributes to its effectiveness; it seduces this generation, and also any other. But how did this photo function? As a site of controversy and public obsession. Shields was only 10 years old when the photograph was taken but the image did not receive an official label of "child pornography" because it was authorized by her guardian and showed no "activity." Widespread interest in the photo resulted not only because the subject was famous but because it was legal "soft core," practically carrying an endorsement to be seen by anyone. The question becomes one of "soft core" to function as a cultural currency, as a legal form of sexually suggestive material that can cross conventional divisions of visual territory.

The term "soft core" is applied to any mildly suggestive sexual material, typically restrictive of minors, visible intercourse or violation. What happens in the Brooke Shields photograph, which is of a minor, is that nothing happens, nothing is violated. Soft core, despite legal definitions, seems to be simply less explicit than hard core. Hard core is extreme sexual content, with unlimited nudity and sexual intercourse. The phrase hard core originated however, as a political description for a loyal faction of a group most resistant to change, "the hard core of a separatist movement." We still describe hard core sports, hard core management, hard core governments, or any sanction deemed extreme. The hard core sex business still fights to retain its radical, separate place in the social structure. Soft core by contrast, is "acceptable," openly traded and appears across mass media. It is a much more widespread style that is even protected by an American law. It is a legal practice of discretion and display. It is American Apparel, magazine covers, and late night TV. We can even perceive the production of soft core social space - not just strip clubs and peep show businesses -but partially visible cubicle office space, dressing rooms, shop windows and performance stages that make public the gesture of making subtly private.

Though hard core is considered more resistant, it is soft core that resists total surrender, holds back. Hard core is obscene, meaning that it shows a full and direct view. Soft core is a visual tease, a suggestive ambiance. It openly reveals that it conceals, that it withholds. I would like to address the paradox of soft core as follows:

The proposition: the way in which soft core suggests a possibility, proposes a seduction, and in thus, alludes to the infinite.

The limit: the way in which soft core limits, covers, conceals or withholds, restraining the viewer and halting the proposition.

I will consider the photographs of Guy Bourdin and then popular teen films as two soft core situations of possibility and its limit.

II. Guy Bourdin
Guy Bourdin published surrealist fashion photographs in French Vogue from the late 1960's through the 1990's. Through a consideration of his work we observe public soft core, half dressed women in suggestive positions. The work is reductive, offering no more than an undressed model and a lush or intimate location. Subtle innuendos incorporate absence and suspense, keeping the images from resolution. Something is always about to happen, is happening, or has just happened, none of it is explained and all of it seems somehow sexual. We are given a "fantasy primer." We also find however a deliberately evasive style, one that repetitively leaves out details at the subtle line of the sexual event - Bourdin illuminates the threshold of the sexual event.

A series by Bourdin involves hotel rooms, some taken from outside looking in, some from within. We are offered a fully involved world but totally unexplained. We see what could be a remote vacation or merely next door. One in particular presents a couple watching what could be pornography on television; another shows two men in a hotel, one undressed. We see what could be nothing more than conversation between two people but seems like more. We are given just enough to be drawn in, to complete the story in our minds. If we try to complete the story, we must depart from the original seduction. If we theoretically interpret the photos, we "break the appearance and play of the manifest discourse," in the words of Baudrillard. Fantasy is something that wants to be free of the object, but soft core is a fantasy of the object and invites a response to what we openly see and do not see, an invitation to imagine.

Kierkegaard wrote in Either/Or, "The highest and most beautiful things in life are not to be heard about, nor read about, nor seen, but, may only be lived. Conjugal love is therefore more aesthetic than romantic love precisely because it is so much more difficult to represent." Even with the world of over exposure and reality tv, behind the scenes of everything, absolutely true, real, Hollywood story of everyone, including scandalous sex lives, we still rarely see the act in public. It is always possible that someone is leading a hard core private life and possible for media to showcase it.There are the images of Nan Goldin or Paris Hilton for instance, but in Guy Bourdin, like most mass media, we are shown much less. "Society," wrote Baudrillard, "is the degree zero of seduction." Public and social life must be ever visible of its boring obedience even when the private, hidden life of the home, is a field of indulgent permission.

There is no reason to hold back but the relief in holding back. We are shown in most fashion magazines and popular media, images of seduction but with restraint, approaching but not exposing the actual event of sex. It is legal, it is popular, it reigns because it reinforces a political ideology of discretion. Soft core is a simultaneous gesture of making public and keeping private. When Wilhelm Hegel published The Philosophy of Right in 1821, he described a government with unprecedented accountability to both public and private life in a spiritual world abandoned by God. Feuerbach and Marx read the text by Hegel as a treatise for the power of society leading to Communism, which did what it could to mandate public life and remove private liberty. What Hegel had really suggested however, was that the social structure does not reign over private life but rather social structure is created for the preservation of private liberty: "Private ends are mediated through the universal which thus appears as a means." By upholding the social system and contributing to it, Hegel posed we can all obtain free reign over our private territory, where one establishes the rules and reigns over them, sexually and otherwise.

While the quality of private life can vary on ownership and capabilities for leisure, the liberation within private life has nothing to do with one's class or profession; it is the product of a shared democratic system established for and intended to be maintained by each person. The problem is that because the "right" social system announces rules for public interaction but grants unchecked personal liberty, a radical private life could threaten the system. This is the contingency of personal liberty. Hegel writes, "Morality has its proper place in this sphere where the paramount thing is reflection on one's doings, and the quest of happiness and private wants." He continues, "Society has the right and duty of acting as trustee to those whose extravagance destroys the security of their own subsistence or their families." The social structure must permit private liberty but somehow simultaneously ordain private life. Soft core images - particularly in mass media, communicate an unthreatening solution - a free, but self-restrained private life. The legalization of soft core images, in tandem with the prohibition of extremist hard core, serves to reinforce the propoganda of discretion.

In Bourdin's scenes, the subject we find is not a threat. Like the young Brooke Shields, most of Bourdin's subjects appear defenseless, relaxed, self-interested and are often diminutive. What we have is innocence and we are lead to accept the photo without defense. But also like the Brooke Shields image, which takes place in a Manhattan bathroom, Bourdin's subjects are cast in opulent settings like a penthouse apartment, a country house or a manicured back yard. The scenes rise from a life of comfort and often excess. In one scene in particular at a hotel, a character sits with a pile of bear cans. Here we see even low class excess. The global economy is at an unprecedented moment in post-production and fashion responds by generating images of all kinds of products out of use, in accumulation, because fashion is, in essence, accumulation, having more than one can wear at one time. The soft core ambiance communicates a passivity within the bounty of production and the leisure of democracy, both in fact, under constant government proliferation and restriction.

Even classic or ancient soft core involves the bounty of nature and relaxing within it. Contemporary soft core fashion photography creates the same passivity towards existing resources and the bounty of the market. Soft core also lessens out defenses to the spectacle. In the spectacle, we are so aggressively confronted with the "sale" sign that we assume false consciousness; we become overly familiar with the tactics of the market, to a point of denial. But if the spectacle operates constantly on the truth that "we know we cannot control our desire to buy," soft core seduction operates on the premise that the consumer believes that "we really know we can control our own desire." With Bourdin and other fashion photographs, we submit to a false innocence in consumption, a consumption of luxury and inessential goods. The world is being sold to those who already possess it, and this time the sales tactic is not agressive and overt but mild and suggestive.

In the fashion ad, we not only give over to a harmless sexual event but we ascribe the same harmlessness to consumption. So the stage of the luxury spectacle is set: innocent and restrained sexuality, frequently accompanied by select commodities. This combination of discreet sexuality with conspicuous consumption is an ideal merger for capitalism. The limit in morality and money is made evident and reinforces the ideology of the conservative asset class. Hegel writes, "the fact that 'moderation' is cited as the principle of aristocracy implies the beginning at this point of a divorce between public authority and private interest. And yet at the same time these touch each other so directly that this constitution by its very nature stands on the verge of lapsing forth with into tyranny or anarchy - the harshest of political conditions." Though Nietzsche described that aristocracy opposed liberty, Hegel suggests that the moderation of aristocracy is essential to the liberty of all. Aristocracy, Hegel indicates, is a necessary power in dialog with the fragility of private interest. Aristocracy is power in civilized form, power with discretion, power as soft core. Bourdin's images showcase those with capital and influence content to enjoy their private power with temperance.Even the contemporary architecture and social spaces for luxuries are driven by an ideology of soft core, aimed at defining the way of life of those in power by displaying limited items and a message of restraint. The contrast is low end shopping with its hard core, always visible, always abundant excessive style where nothing is hidden.

III. Consequence
Apart from its sober socio-political associations, soft core is also nothing but "lite" sexuality. Bourdin's photographs showcase nude, almost always young models, and that is a real and primal basis of their attraction. They can offer a pleasure of "just looking," of taking pleasure in the superficial without requiring an investment in the consequences. Subsequently, soft core attracts the sleazy voyeur who is willingly spellbound by unassuming subjects and an expendable notion of sexuality. Soft core can also be something "trashy." This returns us to the cultural currency of soft core and how it can attract diverse audiences. For these reasons, the role and status of soft core is debated. Soft core is popularly deemed a disposable pleasure, which makes it an ideal mate for magazines. With a particular frame of mind, the scene is a momentary romance. Soft core is an elegy to flirtation and a celebration of the beginnings of sex, even as tame as adolescent expectations. In this way soft core is a proposition that aludes to an unknown infinite. But because of their age, young people also reach the restrictions of parents or the law. The paradox of soft core - possibility and its limit - is the crux of Lolita or The Graduate, and countless other teen stories.

Kierkegaard asked, "What is the happiest existence? It is that of a young girl of sixteen years when she is pure and innocent, possesses nothing." The innocent interest the photographer, writer, filmmaker and also the theorist, because they pose no defense against an imposing direction. In any soft core content, we begin with nothing or very little, and speculate everything, including absolute truth. The reality of a sixteen-year-old girl or boy may be utter discontent, but a soft core photo, novel or film thrives off of the potential. Larry Clark, Terry Richardson and Richard Kern have all made careers on young subjects confident enough to overcome their awkward inhibitions and offer up their bodies . But somehow like the teenager - who can never to any extent be "understood" - soft core evades our final interpretation. Soft core is just like a teenager, to whom we may ascribe complicated motivations but then find nothing of complex significance behind the surface. For some however, especially the young, soft core involves a sincerity in this lack of meaning, a total investment in the short lived, unresolved sexual event.

If we consider the genre of teen films, we not only find innocence and sexual beginning but we discover many of the same social issues as in soft core fashion photographs. Teen films are like an instruction manual on moderated social contribution of Hegelian skills, whether athletics, looks, popularity or scholarship. Teen films also reinforce the necessity of private liberty - typically a car or a party. But the strength of the teen film is the impending sexual encounter. Young, inexperienced and suggestive sexuality drives the narratives of Kids, Valley Girl, The Last Picture Show, Sixteen Candles, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Splendor in the Grass, and an entire set by National Lampoons where soft core scenes refer to unseen hard core events. But what is unique to the teen film, is that protagonists fight for liberty against an openly known threat and limitation, establishing a technique for looking at the world with a concern for "going too far." Even when the teen film makes a social and not a romantic interest primary, as in Rebel Without a Cause, Dead Poets Society, or even The Breakfast Club, we still find the young person possesses tremendous desire and potential but fears the limit set by the adult. The teen may act like everything is possible and none of it matters anyway, but the limit - the threshold into adulthood, and hard core reality - looms over each and every scene like an invisible God.

The teen film, like the Bourdin photograph, illuminates the limit. In the novel The Virgin Suicides, which is also a fim, author Jeffrey Eugenides writes of an encounter in which the character Trip Fontaine is approached by Lux Lisbon one night in his car: "he felt himself grasped by his long lapels, pulled forward and pushed back, as a creature with a hundred mouths started sucking the marrow form his bones. She said nothing as she came on like a starved animal…after only a few minutes, with only the words 'Gotta get back before bed check,' Lux left him, more dead than alive." Her sexuality was asserted but restrained by an invisible authority somewhere calling her back for bed check. And then later, when Trip and Lux eventually make it to an empty football field, the text gives only a suggestion:

After their dance as Homecoming King and Queen, Trip had ushered Lux through the knot of applauding subjects through the door to get some air…'What do we do now?' Lux had asked. 'Whatever we want.'…They walked past the fifty, the forty, and into the end zone, where no one saw them…Throughout the act headlights came on across the field.

The teens assert their freedom to do "whatever they want," as their almost aristocratic right as King and Queen. The reader may assume that "the act" is sex, but nothing specific is provided. The vague description simultaneously reveals and conceals, allowing the reader to finish the details, as in a Bourdin photograph. But the consequence of this liberated act for the characters of Trip and Lux finds Trip stating "I got sick of her right then," and it contributes in part to Lux's suicide. The message of the story, like most soft core teen cinema, is that abusing your freedom, going to far, passing the limit, will lead to unhappiness. There is of course always the exception, as in Dazed & Confused when Mitch Kramer returns home in the morning after a night of lawless acts and yet he escapes punishment. His home lacks a father and there is a testing of the limits that dominates the film.

The consequence of crossing the line is part of the 1980 teen story Blue Lagoon staring Brooke Shields. She and Christopher Atkins played children shipwrecked on an island in the 19th century, who discover their sexuality together and subsequently bear a child. In the following year, 1981, Shields played in the teen film Endless Love. A young couple chooses to "go all the way" only to be shattered by the results including the arrest of Shields' lover. At the same time that Shields was in these films, she was featured on television and in magazines for Calvin Klein. She was shown testifying, "Nothing comes between me and my Calvins." This was a simul-cast of Shields. Shields became an index to soft core, its burgening promise and looming consequence. Nothing could be more interesting than how it ended for Shields who disappeared without adult fame of any substance. Her life is like a soft core existence in which she will be remembered only for her adolescence, of her infinite potential, never fulfilled. Prince comments on his motivation for selecting the photograph used in Spiritual America:

Brooke as the subject becomes an indirect object, an abstract entity whose sex is unknown. Brooke is it. And as an it, is in a sense the subject of an impersonal verb that expresses a condition without referring to an agent. The condition that's expressed is an objective resemblance of Brooke that could never be guaranteed in daily life. This is what photographs can do. It's a condition that can only be achieved on a flat and seamless surface, a physical location which can represent her resemblance all in one place - a place that has the chance of looking real, but a place that doesn't have any chance of being real. My desires needed satisfaction… And satisfaction seems to come about by ingesting; perhaps "perceiving" the fiction her photograph imagined.

Prince seems compelled by seeing something genderless, something that cannot be real, a fiction. In soft core material we get something of an "objective resemblance" to the real world. The image or story is just a surface, just the beginning without anything certain before, after or behind it. This should liberate us from story, status or a lurking unconscious, if it is true that what we see is other than real. But somehow instead, we always engage in presupposition, in the dialog or fantasy. The fiction we find, as with Brooke Shields, is also real and the real, also a fiction. Soft core resists the explicit and thus also resists fixed interpretation. Nothing could come between Shields and her Calvins because that relationship is worth nothing outside of its moment.

Soft core is perhaps a new model for theory. We have had enough hard core theory - the explicit truth being asserted or destroyed. Thought remains an ongoing proposition. Soft core theory would consider truth, whether or not the veil is lifted. Soft core theory would take thought as possibility and also thought with limit, as opposed to the more accepted eternal recurrence. Such a dual consideration of thinking is as Simone de Beauvoir proposed in the conclusion of Ethics of Ambiguity:

As soon as one considers a system abstractly and theoretically, one puts himself, in effect, on the plane of the universal, thus, of the infinite. That is why reading the Hegelian system is so comforting. I remember having experienced a great feeling of calm on reading Hegel in the impersonal framework of the Bibliotheque Nationale in August 1940. But once I got into the street again, into my life, out of the system, beneath a real sky, the system was no longer of any use to me: what it had offered me, under a show of the infinite, was the consolations of death; and I again wanted to live in the midst of living men… it is up to each one to fulfill his existence as an absolute. Regardless of the staggering dimensions of the world about us, the density of our ignorance, the risks of catastrophes to come, and our individual weakness within the immense collectivity, the fact remains that we are absolutely free today if we choose to will our existence in its finiteness, a finiteness which is open on the infinite.

If we consider the proposition of the infinite, do we engage in fantasy? If we consider the potential in some thing, even thought itself, does it already possess or rather request from us a limit? We have as Hegel, Kierkegaard, Sartre, and de Beauvoir proposed, and alive in the considerations of Nancy and Badiou, done nothing philosophically but reveal that in each moment we have again infinite potential. However, the hard core, postmodern destruction of thinking has left us with an eternally recurring nothing, reducing us to the value alone in the finite moment. Like a soft core photograph, life asserts infinite potential in each finite moment. If we imagine infinite consequence, if we fantasize beyond the moment, then whatever has been previously overdertemined or undermined is allowed influence upon that which has not yet occurred. The moment, however naive is potent, is hard core.

This is how we learn from the soft core scenario: everything in this moment and in the end is nothing, that is, unless it is allowed real world consequence.

Copyright Rachel K. Ward, February 2005