The Rotating Bed
Paul B. Preciado, Pornotopia: An Essay on Playboy’s Architecture & Biopolitics
Zone Books, 304pp, £20.95, ISBN 9781935408482
reviewed by Jane Cleasby
Those coming to Paul B. Preciado’s Pornotopia: An Essay on Playboy’s Architecture & Biopolitics having read the genre-splitting, sexually graphic critical memoir that was 2013’s Testo Junkie may be surprised at the former’s comparable conventionality. Save for the preface and the postscript, Preciado is barely visible in the pages of Pornotopia, and readers may be disappointed to find his writing in a much more traditionally academic style. This is likely due to the book’s genesis as a doctoral project in 2001; Preciado himself has since said he finds such disciplined academic writing ‘really dry’. Despite its more conventional format and unassuming cover, Pornotopia avoids dryness. Preciado’s preface opens:
The weirdness of the image of Hefner in his PJs talking domesticity is doubled as we imagine this meeting of him and a similarly attired Preciado through the TV screen in the middle of the night. Just as Preciado’s curiosity stops him sleeping, so we are reeled in with a desire to see an organisation which is rarely regarded as representing anything more than the most superficial and exploitative entertainment from a totally unimagined angle. In the next 300 pages, Preciado brilliantly unfolds the 20th century to show a period inextricably bound up in the development of the Playboy universe.
Drawing from the work of architectural historian Beatriz Colomina, Preciado argues that what (re)defines modern architecture is its engagement with, and even its becoming, mass media. Describing the unprecedented dissemination enjoyed by Playboy through the different media structures of the magazine and the television, as well as the penthouses, mansions and clubs, he makes the case for ‘Hugh Hefner as a pop architect and the Playboy empire as an architectural multimedia production company…’ Seeing Playboy as essential to understanding the production and formation of the subjectivity of the individual in the modern ‘pharmacopornographic regime’, Preciado uses the magazine as ‘a discursive laboratory to interrogate the production of hegemonic heterosexual masculinity within capitalism’.
Key to Preciado’s argument is the idea that gender and sexual identity are not defined by ‘distinct psychological characteristics,’ but are instead shaped by 'habitat'. Heterosexual masculinity was redefined by Playboy through the narrative that occupied so much of the magazine’s content: the 20th-century man leaves his post-war matrimonial home, and the picket fences of suburbia, to take on the role of the bachelor-lover-spy in the gadget filled bachelor pad. Occupying a space influenced by both materialist Marxism and theories of performativity and constructionism, Preciado asserts that Playboy ‘considered the restructuring of gender and sexuality codes as a semiotic and aesthetic battle, fought through information, architecture and consumer objects.’
At times it reads as though Preciado is looking to credit Hefner and his Playboy as masterminding the total transformation of male subjectivity in the late 20th century, while other times his passive phrasing suggests an agentless force at play. This could be in part due to the text’s translation from Spanish, but I think for the most part it is due to the theoretical framework Preciado is invested in. Pornotopia’s understanding of modern history leans heavily on Foucauldian thinking, whereby models of control and normalisation are not deployed consciously by individuals or centralised agencies (governments or organisations); rather multiple techniques and institutions converge to create modern systems of power and concordantly modern subjectivity.
By placing Playboy in a historical context as one such institution, Preciado provides a way into understanding the genealogical manifestation of 20th-century biopolitics; or, put another way, Playboy becomes a lens through which to examine the development of modern systems of power and control. At times his theoretical considerations wander off, and become abstract to the point of being obscure: an academic tic that will be an enjoyable deviation for some and a minor annoyance for others.
However, for every occasion where Preciado leaves us a little dizzy and confused with these theoretical elevations, there is another in which he artfully pulls together seemingly disparate threads into vibrant tapestries of meaning. Succinctly weaving together the history of the bikini and the analogous development and deployment of atomic weaponry, he explosively concludes:
The real strength of the work lies in these moments when Preciado helps us zoom out to see this expanded conceptual picture. Pornotopia creates a panoramic viewing space from which the reader can visualise the temporal and spatial development of the Playboy multimedia universe, while still managing to pay adequate attention to the smallest individual details of design. In a postscript Preciado explains that Playboy Enterprises would not grant him permission to use any material outside of the public domain. However, his attention to detail and skill as a writer ensure the reader is not hindered by this lack of visual accompaniment: whether it be centrefold pin-ups or the complex mechanisms of the playboy’s kitchen, Preciado’s descriptions are satisfyingly thorough.
Where photos are included, Preciado’s analysis and exposition often turns the picture into something much greater altogether. In the chapter ‘The Invention of the Pharmacopornographic Bed’, we have a photo of Hefner on the phone, in his pyjamas, on his rotating bed. As the chapter progresses, Preciado uses the image to crystallise his idea of ‘pharmacopornographic capitalism’, in which a pill-popping Hefner occupies a post-domestic space that is for both work and play (work is play). He elegantly depicts Hefner as a ‘prosthetic, ultraconnected masculine subject’, sitting (or laying) at the epicentre of a network of tentacular media that infiltrates and rearranges every post-domestic space of the western hemisphere.
In the conclusion Preciado examines what Playboy leaves behind as its global empire slowly crumbles:
On finishing Pornotopia I am left with the worry that Preciado himself ends up echoing this myopic vision of the 20th century. The preface promises: ‘this book embraces queer, transgender, disability, and porn studies as critical frameworks to understand the biopolitical mutations introduced by Playboy during the Cold War America,’ and that Preciado has the critical eye that comes from such disciplines is evident from the book’s undressing and destabilising of the norms which governed 20th-century (hetero)sexual relations. However, the importance of these areas of study also lies in the ways they have brought to the foreground previously marginalised or excluded narratives; Preciado does not, and this makes for a reading experience that is at times frustrating. For example, he presents the story of the hiring of the first ‘Playmate’, Janet Pilgrim:
Preciado goes on to explain the theory of ‘immaterial labour’ as developed by Italian theorists Christian Marazzi and Maurizio Lazzarato, in which what was once considered private (the body, communication, sexuality) becomes part of the productive economy. To me this would seem like a natural moment to consider what has been described as ‘the feminization of labour’, and the argument that it is women who have largely borne the brunt of the demand for what was once private to become commoditised asset, but no such discussion manifests. (I am not suggesting Preciado should engage in feminist debates regarding Playboy and pornography, which he articulates a necessary critical distance from in the opening pages.) Perhaps my criticism is unfair, and this narrowness is inevitable given the nature of the project: Preciado explicitly sets out to ‘interrogate the production of hegemonic heterosexual masculinity within capitalism’; but given Preciado’s image as a radical trans/queer/feminist activist and the audience accordant with that, I doubt I will be the only one disappointed by these omissions.
This project came to me during a bout of middle-of-the-night insomnia in 2001. Locked up in my cold Brooklyn apartment, I was watching TV to try to get back to sleep. Suddenly I saw Hugh Hefner, the founder of Playboy… Like myself, he was wearing his pajamas and sleepers and he was in bed, but, strangely enough, he was giving an interview… engaged in a monologue about male conquering domesticity, the need of escaping green-lawn suburbia and having an urban room of his own. Hefner in pajamas quoting Virginia Woolf?
I couldn’t return to sleep.
The weirdness of the image of Hefner in his PJs talking domesticity is doubled as we imagine this meeting of him and a similarly attired Preciado through the TV screen in the middle of the night. Just as Preciado’s curiosity stops him sleeping, so we are reeled in with a desire to see an organisation which is rarely regarded as representing anything more than the most superficial and exploitative entertainment from a totally unimagined angle. In the next 300 pages, Preciado brilliantly unfolds the 20th century to show a period inextricably bound up in the development of the Playboy universe.
Drawing from the work of architectural historian Beatriz Colomina, Preciado argues that what (re)defines modern architecture is its engagement with, and even its becoming, mass media. Describing the unprecedented dissemination enjoyed by Playboy through the different media structures of the magazine and the television, as well as the penthouses, mansions and clubs, he makes the case for ‘Hugh Hefner as a pop architect and the Playboy empire as an architectural multimedia production company…’ Seeing Playboy as essential to understanding the production and formation of the subjectivity of the individual in the modern ‘pharmacopornographic regime’, Preciado uses the magazine as ‘a discursive laboratory to interrogate the production of hegemonic heterosexual masculinity within capitalism’.
Key to Preciado’s argument is the idea that gender and sexual identity are not defined by ‘distinct psychological characteristics,’ but are instead shaped by 'habitat'. Heterosexual masculinity was redefined by Playboy through the narrative that occupied so much of the magazine’s content: the 20th-century man leaves his post-war matrimonial home, and the picket fences of suburbia, to take on the role of the bachelor-lover-spy in the gadget filled bachelor pad. Occupying a space influenced by both materialist Marxism and theories of performativity and constructionism, Preciado asserts that Playboy ‘considered the restructuring of gender and sexuality codes as a semiotic and aesthetic battle, fought through information, architecture and consumer objects.’
At times it reads as though Preciado is looking to credit Hefner and his Playboy as masterminding the total transformation of male subjectivity in the late 20th century, while other times his passive phrasing suggests an agentless force at play. This could be in part due to the text’s translation from Spanish, but I think for the most part it is due to the theoretical framework Preciado is invested in. Pornotopia’s understanding of modern history leans heavily on Foucauldian thinking, whereby models of control and normalisation are not deployed consciously by individuals or centralised agencies (governments or organisations); rather multiple techniques and institutions converge to create modern systems of power and concordantly modern subjectivity.
By placing Playboy in a historical context as one such institution, Preciado provides a way into understanding the genealogical manifestation of 20th-century biopolitics; or, put another way, Playboy becomes a lens through which to examine the development of modern systems of power and control. At times his theoretical considerations wander off, and become abstract to the point of being obscure: an academic tic that will be an enjoyable deviation for some and a minor annoyance for others.
However, for every occasion where Preciado leaves us a little dizzy and confused with these theoretical elevations, there is another in which he artfully pulls together seemingly disparate threads into vibrant tapestries of meaning. Succinctly weaving together the history of the bikini and the analogous development and deployment of atomic weaponry, he explosively concludes:
If the atomic bomb was a threat to the integrity of the biological body of the individual and the political body of the nation state, the bikini was the representation within the public space of the paradoxical status of female sexuality: a disruptive energy that must be governmentally controlled and kept within the borders of domesticity, but also a seductive energy and the object of heterosexual male visual desire.
The real strength of the work lies in these moments when Preciado helps us zoom out to see this expanded conceptual picture. Pornotopia creates a panoramic viewing space from which the reader can visualise the temporal and spatial development of the Playboy multimedia universe, while still managing to pay adequate attention to the smallest individual details of design. In a postscript Preciado explains that Playboy Enterprises would not grant him permission to use any material outside of the public domain. However, his attention to detail and skill as a writer ensure the reader is not hindered by this lack of visual accompaniment: whether it be centrefold pin-ups or the complex mechanisms of the playboy’s kitchen, Preciado’s descriptions are satisfyingly thorough.
Where photos are included, Preciado’s analysis and exposition often turns the picture into something much greater altogether. In the chapter ‘The Invention of the Pharmacopornographic Bed’, we have a photo of Hefner on the phone, in his pyjamas, on his rotating bed. As the chapter progresses, Preciado uses the image to crystallise his idea of ‘pharmacopornographic capitalism’, in which a pill-popping Hefner occupies a post-domestic space that is for both work and play (work is play). He elegantly depicts Hefner as a ‘prosthetic, ultraconnected masculine subject’, sitting (or laying) at the epicentre of a network of tentacular media that infiltrates and rearranges every post-domestic space of the western hemisphere.
In the conclusion Preciado examines what Playboy leaves behind as its global empire slowly crumbles:
In January 2012, Hefner published an illustrated autobiography in six volumes of 3506 pages in four languages, that The Independent called “the best historical book of the twentieth Century…” Playboy thus launches a titanic allegoric operation through which a part will substitute for the whole: the history of the twentieth century is the autobiography of Hugh Hefner.
On finishing Pornotopia I am left with the worry that Preciado himself ends up echoing this myopic vision of the 20th century. The preface promises: ‘this book embraces queer, transgender, disability, and porn studies as critical frameworks to understand the biopolitical mutations introduced by Playboy during the Cold War America,’ and that Preciado has the critical eye that comes from such disciplines is evident from the book’s undressing and destabilising of the norms which governed 20th-century (hetero)sexual relations. However, the importance of these areas of study also lies in the ways they have brought to the foreground previously marginalised or excluded narratives; Preciado does not, and this makes for a reading experience that is at times frustrating. For example, he presents the story of the hiring of the first ‘Playmate’, Janet Pilgrim:
[Pilgrim] was presented as a “secretary who came to Hefner looking for an Addressograph machine due to the increasing volume of subscriptions. Hefner… agreed to buy her one if she would pose nude.” Playboy’s blurring of the Fordist distance between labor and sexuality, between publicity and privacy could be understood as a paradigmatic example of the transformation of the working practises within neoliberal economies in the second half of the twentieth century.
Preciado goes on to explain the theory of ‘immaterial labour’ as developed by Italian theorists Christian Marazzi and Maurizio Lazzarato, in which what was once considered private (the body, communication, sexuality) becomes part of the productive economy. To me this would seem like a natural moment to consider what has been described as ‘the feminization of labour’, and the argument that it is women who have largely borne the brunt of the demand for what was once private to become commoditised asset, but no such discussion manifests. (I am not suggesting Preciado should engage in feminist debates regarding Playboy and pornography, which he articulates a necessary critical distance from in the opening pages.) Perhaps my criticism is unfair, and this narrowness is inevitable given the nature of the project: Preciado explicitly sets out to ‘interrogate the production of hegemonic heterosexual masculinity within capitalism’; but given Preciado’s image as a radical trans/queer/feminist activist and the audience accordant with that, I doubt I will be the only one disappointed by these omissions.