I struggled to begin reading this book. One part of me was fatigued. A torrent of modernities have blown through cultural studies over the last decades—linguistic, romantic, photographic, cinematic, affective—you name it, all claiming a slice of something modern without struggling over what precisely beyond rhetoric modernism means. Now there is a pornographic modernity?
And then I read the book.
Whether you are ready to add pornographic modernity to your internal debate over what is at bottom a historiographic dispute, or not, Wang’s argument is both irrefutable and comfortably synthetic. Wang’s premise is the reverse of mine. Under incontrovertible economic, political, social, physical, and generic upheaval, an event without a predicate, modern porn, popped onto the historical horizon. Then just as suddenly, novel sexual materials started piling up and new porn markets emerged. I underline Wang’s causal argument here because it is more evental than chronological precisely in order to...