system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Please help, what does “the visual is pornographic” mean?


" 'The visual is essentially pornographic, which is to say that it has its end in rapt, mindless fascination; thinking about its attributes becomes an adjunct to that, if it is unwilling to betray its object; while the most austere films necessarily draw their energy from the attempt to repress their own excess (rather than from the more thankless effort to discipline the viewer).' " -  Fredric Jameson's \_Signatures of the Visible.

I have no idea what this means,I wouldn't know how to write a 5 paragraph essay in a final exam about this quote, please help me understand it.
gpt
Jameson expects us to agree without great argument that "rapt, mindless fascination" for which "thinking about its attributes becomes an adjunct" is an attribute of pornography; that is, he considers it obvious that, in pornography, the act of looking is more important than the act of thinking about what you're looking at. He wants to argue that this way of relating to pornography is also the way relate to "the visual" in general, which, in the context of this book, refers primarily to film as a medium. His point, then, is that like pornography, mindlessly looking at a film is a more primary and fundamental way of relating to it than thinking about it. This applies even to films that seem subdued and intellectual, because those films are properly understood as trying to "repress their own excess" (the pornographic excess common to all films) and not as engaging directly with the thoughts of the viewer. None of this is to say that films can't be thought about, or that thinking about films isn't a worthwhile thing to do (if Jameson believed that, he wouldn't write about film), but it is to say that all of this thinking has to come to terms with that looking at films without thinking is our most basic way of interacting with them.