Obscenity and pornographic culture did not disappear with Times Square’s gentrification in the 1990s. Rather, gentrification inaugurated new obscene cultural forms, displaying the opulence of celebrity and the enclosed spaces of media production. Using observations and interviews with production staff at Total Request Live (1998–2008), the flagship music countdown show on the MTV cable network, the essay examines techniques of incorporating audiences and audience-generated content into late-1990s/early-2000s TV production, just before social media’s rise. It examines media production within a material urban process, not simply producing ideology or images, but inciting and laboring on forms of self-exposure and a quasi-erotic excitement of watching others transgress deepening class hierarchies. The essay describes the urban material foundations of this cultural form as infrastructures of obscenity. For this, it theorizes obscenity beyond sex and explicitly erotic content. It likewise proposes obscenity as an alternative to standard analytical approaches to media, like ‘ritual’, ‘transgression’ and carnivalesque ‘inversion’ or resistance, which are insufficient to understand the production techniques at TRL. It connects those insights to Times Square’s millennial transformations, focusing on the strategies used by MTV’s Midtown Studio in the production of TRL. The analysis demonstrates how the social production of new architectural and infrastructural strategies in Times Square’s post-Disney Store period used highly staged audience engagement to build a recursive, shared experience of obscenity through transgression, prurience, intensity, and authenticity. The infrastructures of obscenity approach complements theories of active viewership but also problematizes viewers’ activity as fully-formed resistance or ‘subversion,’ implicitly or explicitly. This essay’s evidence illustrates how an opposing organizational project by media capital happens, imperfectly, pragmatically, and perhaps even contrary to many theoretical assumptions about how audiences and industry encounter each other, provoking further an engagement with contradiction, ambivalence, and labor to materially organize the heterogeneity of social feeling.

1990 年代时代广场的高档化并没有使淫秽和色情文化消失。相反，高档化开创了新的淫秽文化形式，展示了名人的富裕和媒体生产的封闭空间。通过对 MTV 有线网络上的旗舰音乐倒计时节目Total Request Live (1998-2008) 的制作人员的观察和采访，本文研究了将观众和观众生成的内容融入 1990 年代末/2000 年代初电视制作的技术，就在社交媒体兴起之前。它考察了物质城市过程中的媒体生产，而不仅仅是生产意识形态或图像，而是煽动和努力以自我暴露的形式和观看他人越过加深的阶级等级制度的准色情兴奋。这篇文章将这种文化形式的城市物质基础描述为淫秽的基础设施。为此，它将色情和色情内容之外的淫秽理论化。它还建议将淫秽作为媒体标准分析方法的替代方案，例如“仪式”、“越界”和狂欢节式的“倒置”或抵抗，这些方法不足以理解TRL 的生产技术。它将这些见解与时代广场的千禧年转型联系起来，重点关注 MTV 的中城工作室在制作TRL时使用的策略. 该分析展示了时代广场后迪士尼商店时期的新建筑和基础设施战略的社会生产如何利用高度阶段性的观众参与，通过越轨、审慎、强度和真实性来建立一种递归的、共享的淫秽体验。淫秽方法的基础设施补充了积极的理论收视率，但也暗示或明确地将观众的活动问题化为完全形成的抵抗或“颠覆”。本文的证据说明了媒体资本的对立组织项目是如何发生的，不完美、务实，甚至可能与许多关于观众和行业如何相遇的理论假设相反，进一步激发了对矛盾、矛盾和劳动的参与，以物质组织社会情感的异质性。