I once heard someone explain why pornography is harmful to the human mind. He said that pornography was by its very nature a disjointed thing, a mutilated part of the healthy whole. Pornography trains us to view people as parts of their wholes, it trains us to focus on and see only segments of their realities, reducing them to objects without complete meaning.
Experiencing sex is different from experiencing porn – and this difference in wholeness is one big factor. When you have sex with a person, you engage with a whole person; the person comes with their name and identity, their significances and memories, their weight and their odour and their oilsweat and their hair, their breathing and their boniness, their complete physiology and psychology bundled in one uncompromised mass. Sex is messy, unpredictable, pungent, arrogant; sex is about persons. But when you have porn, it is not this way. You don’t watch a person in porn, you watch a butt. You watch a boob. A leg. A mouth. A voice. A posture. You take in these fragments and the person is not there – no sound, no smell, no weight, no texture, no resistance, no presence. In porn you are alone, entwining your mind around itself, an activity that leaves you just the same you were before, with your own fluids, fatigues, and fantasies… no more. Because porn deals in fragments and not the whole thing, there is no union, no cultivation, and no harvest.
It is in this respect that I submit that a modern collection of quotations is, in essence, the same as a gallery of pornography.
Take the popular practice of putting quotes on social media. Most of us use our Facebook stories, Instagram posts, and WhatsApp statuses as a means to project our image; one common way is to share impressive quotations.
I do not claim that all those who frequently share quotations on these platforms do so pretentiously. I know that often, it comes from a genuine sense of inspiration and comradeship, a desire to put out in public something that resonates deeply with one’s own mind. The root of the problem, perhaps, is not in the act of sharing. The root, perhaps, lies in the act of reading quotations.
A quotation, when presented as a standalone item, is the same as a bottled body part in the biology lab, or an eighteen-minute porn video on one’s computer. It is a fragmented piece of a missing whole, one that can give you pleasure, but no consummation. A line read as a quote was not meant to be read as a quote. It was not meant to be picked out and displayed in a vacuum, shorn of all context. Of course, it still carries meaning. It still carries force. It even carries beauty. But it is only a part of the whole, like a luscious pair of scarlet lips on your screen is only a part of the actual human being.
The culture of showcasing beauty in a disjointed form inundates our world. For example, when our favourite song is set as a ringtone, it is an offense against the song, but we imagine it to be a compliment. The five-second jingle, it is imagined, represents the song. But the jingle is just the jingle, no less and no more. It represents itself, not the song. A ten-second segment lifted from a song is as much a representation of the song as a close-up photograph of a person’s thigh is a representation of the person. The photograph may be an excellent photograph; but it does not substitute the person.
A quote is just a small bit of the whole text. It is not meant to stand on its own, like a nosetip is not meant to hang in the air all by itself.
RIGHT: This does not convey Shakespeare. This conveys a few lines spoken by a character in a play written by Shakespeare.
Too many of us, in our momentary elation, mistake encountering a quote with encountering a work, or a person. It is harmful in the sense that pornography is harmful. It feeds us placebo experience.
Sometimes a quote is an epigram – a statement that is meant to be taken as a standalone item. Merriam-Webster defines the epigram as “a terse, sage, or witty and often paradoxical saying.” There are no dangers in reading epigrams as quotations, they don’t need a context to convey their significance. But not all quotes are epigrams. Many are, in their original form, lines which are firmly embedded in context – a context that is essential if we are to follow what the lines really mean. Famous examples include Nietschze’s ‘God is dead‘, Marx’s ‘Religion is the opium of the masses‘, and Sartre’s ‘Hell is other people.’ A million more examples can be found if one spends some time reading the quotes on Goodreads.
The phenomenon of assigning no context – or sometimes, the wrong context – to quotes is perhaps most wonderfully used by that’s-what-she-said jokes. Misquotation refers to the act of quoting a person incorrectly. The act of presenting a quote out of its context may perhaps be called disquotation. The mechanics of a that’s-what-she-said joke is parallel to the mechanics of a deepfake video, where we can mix up disparate elements and create a realistic lie.
Disquotation can present the speaker in a false light. The person might then defend himself and provide the necessary context, trying to set the record right. But we do not have this luxury with most thinkers, writers or speakers whom we tend to quote. Most of these people are so profusely quoted that they cannot hope to keep track. Indeed, many of these people are no longer alive. Their works remain, but when we peruse their quotes, we miss the mountain in looking at the rock.
It is akin to porn consumption, where engaging with video clips is preferred over the complexity of engaging with a person. The porn-viewer looks at bellies, breasts, feet; it arouses his feelings and moves him to emotion. The quote-reader looks at pretty lines, wise lines, inspiring lines; it arouses his mind and moves him to thought, and it arouses his feelings and moves him to emotion. But the porn-viewer is not with the actor on the video, he is only with himself. He is focusing on another person’s fragments and playing with his own organs. The quote-reader, too, is not with the author of the work, he is only with himself. He is focusing on a text’s fragments and playing inside his own brain.
There is a common joke that porn-addicts are incels and losers who compensate for their social failure by consuming porn. What do we decide about quotation-lovers, then, who are satisfied with a line, not taking the trouble to go to the source and understand the part with regard to the whole?
Thankfully, post-Gutenberg, countless identical copies of most excellent books are widely available all around us. This is not the case with excellent people. Cloning can create a duplicate with identical genes, but it cannot create a duplicate human being identical in terms of psychology and experience. Human cloning, in any case, is banned. Even if they pick up the courage, porn consumers will never be able to bring home the human body of their dreams. Quote consumers don’t have that problem. Will they pick up the courage?