Obscene Allegories: Narrative, Representation, Pornography David Pendleton Reading: The Textual and the Visual In one of his last essays, “Aesthetic Formalization: Kleist’s Uber das Marionettentheater,” Paul de Man distinguishes three modes of reading, three ways of conceptualizing the text — text as mimetic, text as hermeneutic, text as system of rhetorical figures. These are also three ways of describing the relationship between language and meaning: “From being openly asserted and visible in the first case [the mimetic text], meaning is concealed in the second [the hermeneutic text] and has to be disclosed by a labor of decoding and interpretation” (281). Of course, the problem with these models is that language “always refers but never to the right referent” (285). The task of interpretation is thus based on an illusory mastery of the text, a task which can always be under- mined by the next reading. Reading the text as a mechanical system of tropes resists this claim of mastery as long as such a reading acknowledges that the “disarticulation of tropes is pri- marily a disarticulation of meaning” (289). Applying this model to the contemporary pornographic film or video can produce a reading that avoids some of the pitfalls of recent attempts to theorize about pornography. Perhaps because of porns quasi-documentary nature, much of the criti- cism of porn (pro- or anti-) ignores its textual status and appre- hends it as simply “filmed sex.” Thus for conservative critics, pornography on film is much more dangerous than porno-Fall 1992 155 graphic writing since the photographic (or electronic) image is somehow more direct. The indexical nature of this image tends to obscure its textuality. This difficulty finds expression in Justice Potter Stewart's famous definition of pornography: “I know it when I see it.” Anti-porn feminists have similarly declared the porn film dangerous based on a conception of pornography as mimetic. Not only does filmed sex reveal masculine sexuality as sadistic, the porn film provides a model that the viewer can be expected to imitate. Hence the dictum that “pornography is the theory, rape is the practice.” Some pro-porn critics also argue for a mimetic reading of pornography. Taking up the rhetoric of sex- ual liberation, these people see porn as just filmed sex, and since sex is good, so is pornography. Others see porn, once it can be purged of certain regressive and reactive elements, as a vehicle for reeducating desire. More sophisticated readings of pornography take account of the textual nature of the porn film but only in order to assign thematic meaning to the sexual episodes. But the hermeneutic reading of pornography often becomes. simple normative judg- ment as to whether porn is good or bad, politically correct or not. More importantly, both the mimetic and hermeneutic read- ings of pornography partake of the discourse of the scientia sex- ualis that Michel Foucault has shown to be part of the way that power and knowledge work together to create identities, in this case by deploying sex as a means to obtain the essence, the truth about individuals, and thus locate them as subjects in — and subject to — the disciplinary power of the juridico-medical insti- tutions. By reading the porn video as the allegorical staging of a series of grammatically constructed figures, I hope to illustrate the ways in which pornography resists this ideological deploy- ment of sex — which is not to say that pornography is not ideo- logical. Because of my limited exposure to straight porn, I can’t delineate with any specificity the differences between straight and gay porn, except the obvious: gay male porn does not depend on sexual difference. I would only add that pornography plays a different role within gay male culture from the role straight porn plays in straight men’s lives. Gay porn is currently the main source of representations of male homosexuality (in terms of sheer numbers). Pornography is an important part of the way gay men come to acknowledge their own desires and talk to one another about those desires. (Porn is growing in impor- tance in the lesbian community for similar reasons.) This is not156 Discourse 15.1 the same as claiming that gay men are socialized a certain way by pornography. While porn certainly carries ideological messages, it also undermines them by the evacuation of meaning that is partand parcel of the functioning of the kind of porn texts under discussion Porn doesn’t program people or their desires; the relation ship is more dialectical. Gay men play with pornography, trying on different positions, fantasies, kinks. It is the visual and narra- tive conventions of the porn video that encourage this kind of play. Because these conventions differ in some crucial ways from the conventions of the narrative feature film, the subject of most film theory, and because of the different circumstances of their production and exhibition, I have turned to what some will no doubt see as an unholy alliance of de Manian criticism and Barthesian semiology, with some Walter Benjamin thrown in, to produce a reading of the functioning of the porn video which can then be inserted into a Foucauldian discussion of sexuality and its deployment. As a result of the tortuous process of articu- lating this bit of alchemy, my own pleasure in pornography and the pleasure that my friends take from it dissolves into a cloud of academese. A regrettable loss but a necessary part of this attempt to protect porn from both its critics and its defenders. Wanted: How to Build a Better Porn Film? Richard Dyer’s article “Coming to Terms” provides a symp- tomatic example of mimetic readings of pornography from the Left. This article is important because of the status Dyer holds as a prominent gay film theorist/critic; originally published in Jump Cut in 1985, it has recently been reprinted in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Culture, an anthology on subcul- tures and cultural studies. Dyer discusses the narrative structure of gay porn in order to point out what he perceives asa homology between this structure and the way male sexuality (gay or straight) is constructed. This homology leads Dyer to his two main criticisms of current gay porn: its emphasis on the come shot and its “celebration” of promiscuity. Dyer gives three reasons for his distaste for the come shot. First, it partakes of the “ideology of the visible.” Given that we are discussing porn in a visual medium and that male orgasm does produce a visible effect (the ejaculation), it becomes diffi- cult to understand how gay porn’s emphasis on the ejaculation can be said to be problematic. Besides, this objection dates theFall 1992 1357 article; the come shot has become an important way that gay porn can at least pay lip service to safer sex. And although the come shot has been used in straight porn to ignore female sex- uality, does that make it always problematic? More basically, is the come shot really the point? Secondly, according to Dyer, “narrative [in gay porn] isnever organized around the desire to be fucked, but around the desire to ejaculate” (294). Never? Aside from the question of the accu- racy of this statement, or the bigger question of whether one desire is always better than another, there is the fact that these two desires are not mutually exclusive nor do they cover the range of desires explored in gay porn. Thirdly, Dyer criticizes the come shot for the closure it pro- vides. He finds a counter-example in Chantal Akerman's je tu il elle, describing a sexual encounter between two women in the film that represents sexuality as something “dissolving and ebbing” (294). Since the scene begins with the women already going at it and doesn’t end in orgasm, Dyer reads it as an alter- native to the “masculine thrusting narrative” of gay male porn (294). By “narrative thrust,” Dyer presumably means the pro- gression of the typical sexual scene from encounter to foreplay to penetration to orgasm. But these scenes are not typically contained within a thrust ing narrative structure. i agree with Dyer (and others) that clo- sure works to limit the textual circulation of desire and pleasure, but while he criticizes the closure of the sexual scene, he ignores the question of narrative closure across the porn text asa whole. Currently, the typical porn sex scene does end-with orgasm, but the text as a whole resists closure quite simply, by avoiding plot. At any rate, Dyer doesn't seem to mind narrative thrust as long as it achieves closure in the form familiar from classical Holly- wood cinema: the establishment of the couple. He cites a film called Wanted (starring Al Parker and Will Seagers) that ends with afinal encounter, byan idyllic brookside, between Parker and Scagers which is the culmination of their developing friend- ship. . . . And what particularly moved me was the moment when Seagers comes in Parker's mouth, and the latter gently licks the semen off Seagers’ penis, because here it seemed was an explicitand arousing moment of genital sexuality that itself expressed a tender emotional feeling — through its place in the narrative, through the romanticism of the set- ting, through the delicacy of Parker's performance. (296)158 Discourse 15.1 Here Dyer’s critique subtly shifis its terms. As long as the “come shot” can be recuperated into a narrative of romantic love, it is no longer problematic. In fact, it appeals to Dyer precisely because of this unusual ending. Let me now outline the narrative of what I think is a far more typical gay porn film: William Higgins’s Route 69 (1984). This choice is somewhat arbitrary, but having a specific text to refer to will be helpful. Despite the age of this film (shot at a time when the porn industry was about to switch to video), the narra- tive structure of the genre has not changed fundamentally since then, despite the change in format and the consequent changes in distribution and exhibition. And of course, Higgins is perhaps the most famous and influential director currently working in gay male porn. What follows is a brief but necessary “plot” summary (since I'd bet that those of you familiar with Route 69 have only the vaguest memory of what happens). After an opening montage, cross-cutting between a young man washing a car in his driveway and a young man washing himself in the shower, we see the two of them (fraternity brothers, as it turns out) decide to drive from LA. to Las Vegas together. The credit sequence follows, at the end of which the car breaks down in the mountains. After one traveler sets off for help, the other (an Australian exchange stu- dent) is picked up by a “mountain man” who takes the student back to his house and promptly fucks him. When the student expresses his admiration for the mountain man’s prowess, the latter explains that he learned what to do from watching his brother. What follows is a scene set in the same house in which one young man brings in another for a sexual encounter. Pre- sumably the host is the mountain man’s brother, but it is impos- sible to locate this scene temporally in relation to the scene before it, nor are we ever shown the mountain man watching. The next scene returns to the car, repaired by a friend of the mountain man. The Australian student drives off and miracu- lously finds his traveling companion on the outskirts of Las Vegas. We then cut back to the frat house in Los Angeles where an orgy develops among the lusty inhabitants in the aftermath of a party. The final episode is an extended sex scene between our two protagonists in their hotel room. What little dialogue there is in this scene establishes that the two have never had sex with each other before, but there is no mention of any heretofore unre- quited love by either student for the other, nor is there any dialogue at the end to indicate that we should take their acrobat-Fall 1992 159 ics to mean that they have gone from being friends to being lovers. Presumably, Dyer would reject this film because there is no romance to recuperate the numerous come shots. A more detailed account of narrative structure in contemporary pornog- raphy appears in Linda Williams's recent book on straight porn, Hard Core, Basing her argument on Richard Dyer’s excellent work on the musical, she points out that the porn narrative is similar to that of the musical, in which narrative thrust is occa- sionally interrupted by utopian moments. In the musical, these are the song-and-dance numbers; in porn, they are the sex scenes. In both cases, the plot generally concerns the difficulties that a man and a woman have in establishing a relationship, difficulties that are overcome by the successful performance (musical or sexual) between the two at the climax of the film. ‘This structure relies as much as Dyer’s on the porn text being centered on a couple, or at least on a protagonist who has sexual difficulties to resolve. But as I have indicated, such a structure is almost always lacking in current gay porn. Making a Difference In an attempt to locate a more comprehensive and accurate model for the organization of the gay porn narrative, I will now turn to Roland Barthes’s description of the Sadian text in Sade/Fourier/Loyola. There are obvious differences between the two kinds of text: one is literary, the other cinematic; the Sadian text is entirely devoted to the definition and depiction of vice. Nevertheless, the similarities are just as obvious: the shift of emphasis away from plot, the foregrounding of highly elaborate sexual activity, the relative lack of any sense of romantic love or a heterosexual norm (although almost alll of the Sadian liber- tines are male and most of their victims female). Barthes makes a useful distinction between Sadian and mod- ern eroticism: “the former is assertive, combinatory, whereas ours is suggestive, metaphorical” (Sade 27). The striptease is the primary example of modern eroticism: a hermeneutic narrative that teases but doesn’t deliver — at least not right away. In Sade, there is no striptease; the clothes come off immediately, as they do in contemporary porn. Moreover, the very sparse plots of these films and videos lack the hermeneutic code that Barthes points out as crucial for the classic Western narrative. Thus gay porn is assertive and combinatory — the modern Sadian text.160 Discourse 15.1 This link allows us to discuss the pornographic text, like the Sadian text for Barthes, asa language with its own grammar. Such a grammar would seem to provide a more solid basis for investi- gating porn than Dyer’s assertion that porn is organized around the desire to ejaculate. Indeed, Barthes defines porn as “not the discourse being sustained on amorous acts, but this tissue of erotic figures, cut up and combined like rhetorical figures” (133). Barthes delineates the combinatory nature of the Sadian grammar: it organizes units into larger wholes. The smallest unit is the posture: the union of “one action and its bodily point of application” (28). Postures combine to form an operation, which can be considered diachronically as an episode and spa- tially as a tableau or, to use Sade’s term, a figure. Finally, these operations combine to form a scene. This tension within the pornographic operation between its episodic and figural dimen- sions leads to the problem that porn has with narrative. Every few minutes, the story freezes in order to allow the display of the sexual scene. The bodies are arranged in theatrical tableaux, nearly static (at least as compared to the spatial scale of main- stream film), and must maintain these positions long enough to constitute an episode. Hence the importance of the mise en scene: the pornographic figure can be made more dynamic by breaking itinto a series of shots alternating from full body shots to medium. shots to closeups. Sound also works to make the figure more dynamic; hence the often frenzied grunts, groans, and dirty talk, The units of the Sadian grammar are combined according to two main rules of action. The first is exhaustiveness: “the greatest number of postures must be simultaneously achieved” in order that “every part of the body be erotically saturated” (Barthes, Sade 29, 30). The second is reciprocity: any figure can be inverted and any operation reversed. Significantly, this rule is observed much more often in gay male porn than in straight porn. Mutual oral sex is a staple of both gay and straight porn, but the two part ways when it comes to penetration. Top and bottom will often trade places during anal sex in gay porn — although this convention is by no means universally observed. Idon’t want to conflate active/passive with penetrator/pen- etrated, but the lack of male anal penetration in straight porn works to maintain a myth of masculine inviolability that would seem to have at least as many dire consequences as the ideology of the visible that Dyer is so worried about. Interestingly enough, male anal penetration by women with dildos was a mainstay of Victorian literary pornography. Without speculating on the rea-Fall 1992 161 sons for the disappearance of this particular operation, [contend that its absence contributes to the misogynistic nature of much contemporary straight porn. While gay porn’s simple elision of sexual difference is not unproblematic, it substitutes a different difference, a difference that is represented not as a reified bio- logical given butasa rule of the game, assigning the players their positions in a shifting structure that is always subject to inversion and subversion. The rule of reciprocity observed by gay porn creates this shifting structure, expanding the economy of plea- sure and desire beyond the rigid gender hierarchies of typical representations of heterosexuality.! Toreturn to the rule of exhaustiveness: Barthes links this rule to the notion of saturation that he sees as a principle of the organization of the sentence. Just as each part of the body must be sexually employed, so must a sentence fill out each part of its body: subject, predicate, object. The analogy can be extended to conceiving of each sex scene in the porn narrative as a sentence. The narrative functions only to assign different labels to the agents in the sentence: “The Australian student gives the moun- tain man a blowjob.” The pornographic text, like the Sadian text, is thus “a vast discourse founded in its own repetitions” (Barthes, Sade 126). Narrative serves not as motivation for the sex scenes but rather as a device to allow the viewer to distinguish among these repe- titions. The basic principle of gay porn thus becomes not so much the narrating of a romance or the display of the male orgasm as the act of presenting sexual sentences — porno- graphic pleasure as textual and sexual. Barthes finds in textual pleasure a “total disengagement of value” (8). The pleasure in the Sadian text is ‘a matter of speaking this text, not making it act”; to enjoy reading Sade is not to be a sadist (7). Instead Barthes insists on displacing social responsibility from the author to the reader; hence the importance of how to read pornogra- phy, how to apprehend it as a text. Rhapsodies in Blue The gay porn narrative typically ends without any closure, another characteristic of the Sadian text. Unlike the sexual scene, the porn narrative doesn’t come to a climax; it just stops. Barthes defines this kind of narrative structure as thapsodic, which he contrasts with the more usual “organic” narrative structure. The organic narrative arranges its episodes according162 Discourse 15.1 to “a natural (or logical) order” while the rhapsodic narrative “unfolds without order” (140). Actually, most gay porn does have a certain order, but this order is not determined by a nar- rative logic. Generally, the text proceeds by adding larger num- bers of agents in each scene, so that the final scene often resembles an orgy. Porn’s rhapsodic narrative marks its difference from the Oedipal scenario that dominates traditional narrative cinema which subordinates (the characters’ and the spectator’s) desire in the text to the itinerary of a protagonist. In order for desire to become (re)presentable, it must be made (re)productive. Thus the organic narrative recreates the Oedipal trajectory of the psychoanalytic subject; in both cases, desire is constructed as an excess that must be repressed and sublimated to make room for meaning and identity. So too, for Dyer, desire must have a purpose, an end to fulfill. In this way, his humanist reading of pornography becomes complicit with very traditional ideas about sex and sexuality. Michel Foucault postulates that the scientia sexualis was insti- tutionalized in the nineteenth century by a society that set out to formulate the uniform truth ofsex. Asifit suspected sex of harboring a fundamental secret. . . . As if it was essen- tial that sex be inscribed not only in an economy of pleasure but in an ordered system of knowledge. (69) Similarly, both Dyer and Williams attempt to assign meaning to the sexual activity depicted in pornography. In Dyer’s case, the attempt to find meaning in gay porn results from his conception of desire as a force that can be made to serve the interests of a more equitable society ifit can be made more uniformly progres- sive, and thus pornography should serve as the pedagogical tool to produce this constructive desire. Hence Dyer understands gay porn as mimetic, reflecting the current state of desire. Dyer also seems to believe that this mimesis can work in reverse: change the representation of sex, and sexuality itself can be redirected, Dyer wants to make porn more conventional, to give it more conventions, in the form of the organically structured Oedipal narrative. But surely the ideology of the Oedipal narrative is at least as problematic as the ideology of the visible. Linda Williams reads the pornographic text as a hermeneu- tic one: porn sex has a symbolic role to play in the mediation between a couple within the text. According to this view, the porn text requires thematic interpretation in order to determine theFall 1992 163 conflict that separates the members of the couple and the ways that the sexual numbers work to bring the two together. Foucault cites such a hermeneutics of sex as an essential aspect of the scientia sexualis. The sexual behavior of an individual becomes the key to knowledge of that person's “true self.” The kind of hermeneutic readings employed by Williams in Hard Core appear to be called for by the narrative structure of the films she describes — an organic structure very different from the rhap- sodic structure of more recent porn. Williams focuses in large part on the crop of theatrically released porn films from the mid-seventies, but as the industry grew and moved into the home video market in the mid-eighties, the (relatively) complex narra- tive gave way to the cheaper and easier rhapsodic narrative. Of course, the porn video becomes less suited for a herme- neutic reading as it moves from an organic narrative to a rhap- sodic narrative with the subsequent loss of plot, enigma, and theme. Barthes points out that rhapsody frustrates the paradigmatic structure of the narrative (in which each episode has its “correspondent” somewhere fur- ther on which counterbalances or rectifies it) and thereby, eluding the structuralist reading of the narration, it consti- tutes an outrage of meaning: the rhapsodic (Sadian) novel has no meaning or direction, nothing compels it to progress, develop, end, (Sade 140) Instead gay porn seems to call for a conception of its textual status as a series of grammatically constructed figures. Such a conception removes these rhetorical figures from any supposed semantic meaning; instead of being interpreted, they are read. For de Man, this reading apprehends the text as the allegorical staging of these figures. And indeed, gay porn has striking affin- ities with allegory. Pornography as Allegory Allegory has had a privileged status in poststructuralist and especially deconstructive thought as a model for the functioning of language and as a way of rethinking representation. Two key works that paved the way for the ascendance of an allegorical model of signification are Walter Benjamin's The Origin of German Tragic Drama, his examination of the baroque Trauerspiel, and literary critic Angus Fletcher's exhaustive study, Allegory: The The- ory of a Symbolic Mode. It is these works that I will be relying on in164 Discourse 15.1 order to outline the affinities between the gay porn video and the allegorical text. To begin with, there is the a-psychology of the narrative agents. Fletcher points out that the allegorical character is “driven by some hidden force,” not by internal motivation (40). One clue to the allegorical nature of the characters in the porn video is the absence of character names. In the classic realist text, as Barthes points out in $/Z, the name acts as the guarantee of individuality, the glue that binds a bundle of narrative functions and psychological traits into a legal entity, a unified subject (190- 92). The characters in gay porn, by contrast, rarely seem to have a reason for having sex; they just do it. In Route 69, there are no names, only nouns that serve as labels: the frat boy, the exchange student, the mountain man, his brother. No names, no individ- uals, no characters; only agents. The very unprofessional acting in a typical porn video con- tributes to this alienating effect, as does the purely functional dialogue. Benjamin notes of the Trauerspiel that it “is not uncom- mon for speech in the dialogues to be no more than a caption, conjured up from allegorical constellations in which the figures are related to one another” (196), The dialogue in the porn video exists only to give the agents a label that enables the viewer to differentiate them from each other (especially important in gay porn, in which the participants lack the distinguishing char- acteristic of sexual difference). Many of the normalizing critiques of pornography tend to assume that the porn spectator identifies with a given character in any scenario. This identification becomes less stable in gay porn, given the absence of sexual difference (usually assumed in film theory to be a crucial factor in determining spectator iden- tification). The lack of characterization of the narrative agents further limits identification in the traditional sense. Aside from the disjointed, fragmented, rhapsodic narrative structure and the attendant a-psych ological depiction of the narrative agents, there isa marked paucity of point-of-view shots during the sexual encounters, for the obvious reason that such a shot would severely limit our ability to see who's doing what to whom. Com- bine this with the aforementioned absence of sexual difference, and it becomes extremely difficult to say that the porn video slights the desire to be fucked in favor of the phallocentric desire to come. What's to prevent me from identifying with the bottom (thatis, the one being penetrated) in a particular sexual episode, even if there is no reciprocity between the top and the bottom? IfTam watching the mountain man fuck the Australian exchangeFall 1992 165 student, who and where am I? In fact, the gay porn video seems to operate on the spectator’s identification not with the narrative agents but with the syntax of the sexual sentence, the kind of identification that Laplanche and Pontalis (following Freud) point out is crucial to the functioning of fantasy. Here again, attention to the textuality of the porn video points to its slipper- iness, its resistance to interpretation and meaning. Another affinity between the gay porn narrative and allegory is the fragmentary nature of both. Benjamin writes of “the dis- junctive, atomizing principle of the allegorical approach” and constantly refers to the fragment and the ruin as expressions of this approach (208). Benjamin again: “it is common practice in the literature of the baroque to pile up fragments ceaselessly, without any strict idea of a goal” (178). We can see this principle at work in the rhapsodie nature of the gay porn narrative, in its lack of development and closure. The sex scene is not a step in a progression, as it is in the porn films that Williams examines. Instead it exists as an interruption of narrative, a tableau. The porn text does not tell a story, it presents a series of sexual acts without any organic relation between them. Fletcher compares allegorical narrative to paratactic syntax, which he defines as “a structuring of sentences such that they do not convey any distinctions of higher or lower order” (162). Thus, in paratactic syntax, “cach predication stands alone: ‘They ran. He wept. They ran again’ ” (162). Or in Route 6% “The exchange student and the mountain man fuck. The mountain man's brother and a stranger fuck. The frat boys fuck. The exchange studentand his friend fuck.” This paratactic structure, with its lack of hierarchy, stands in opposition to the hypotactic nature of the porn narratives that Williams examines, in which various sexual acts are tried but found wanting until the couple is able to find the right combination that will allow them to consummate their relationship. Read allegorically, the sex scene becomes the illustration of the sexual utterance constructed by the Sadian grammar; the sexual sentence is the caption to the sexual scene. As Fletcher points out, “allegory has the . . . capacity to provide narrative and dramatic equivalents of visual, geometric diagrams” (69). Given the status of sex on the screen as the staging of the porno- graphic syntax, the lack of plot limits the semantic functioning of the sexual episodes. Nor does the sex in gay porn provide the kinds of information about its agents necessary for the typical narrative progression. Hence the obscenity of pornography: sex for the sake of sex. This obscenity is both a utopian elevation of166 Discourse 15.1 sex and its (equally ugopian) devaluation, just as the allegory of the Trauerspiel is for Benjamin both the elevation and devalua- tion of the profane, desacralized world of the German baroque. “An Outrage of Meaning” To consider the gay porn video as allegory, pure and simple, is to deny its mimetic functioning, which would be ludicrous. The emphasis on the come shot that so distresses Dyer is proof of the persistent importance of the impulse to represent sex. Rather, the allegorical nature of the porn video relies on this represen- tational component and vice versa. The sexual figures con- structed within a Sadian grammar can only exist by being staged and filmed — represented. At the same time, there is no way to represent sex without constructing these figures which work to allegorize the sex being represented. This is basically the same relationship between allegory and mimesis that de Man saw oper- ating in modern poetry, a conflict that cannot be dialectically resolved, but instead ends with each obscuring the other (Blind- ness 185), This tension between the allegorical and representational elements of pornography exhibits a difficulty at the heart of the pornographic project. By showing us the sexual act ending with orgasm as the guarantee of the truth of what we are seeing, the gay porn video helps continue the discourse of the scientia sex- ualis, At the same time, the allegorical nature of the rhapsodic narrative undermines this truth status by refusing to acknow!- edge the orgasm or the sexual scene as significant. In its prolif- eration of scenarios, gay porn both maintains the scientia sexualés and begins to unravel it. Dyer wants to use porn as a didactic tool, “a site for ‘re-edu- cating desire,’ " but desire is by definition ineducable (291). While porn can never reeducate desire, it can seek to separate pleasure from meaning; hence its transgressiveness and its value. While the organic porn narratives that Williams examines enlist sex as the mediator between a supposedly distinct masculine and feminine desire, gay porn resists the confinement of pleasure to the intermeshed codes of romance, love, and biology-as-destiny — which is not to say that the representation of pleasure in gay porn isnot linked to other equally ideologically determined and intermeshed codes of class, race, and masculinity. This resistance is created by gay porn’s insignificance. Because of its inability to make sex signify in any fixed and stableFall 1992 167 way, the gay porn rhapsody begins to strip sex of the demand for meaning placed on it by the scientia sexualis, thus revealing an allegorical element which in Benjamin's words is “opposed to... the discovery of truth” (229). This allegorical element points to the way in which pornography's constant attempt to reveal the truth of sex undermines itself. Anti-porn critics like Susan Griffin see the bodies in the pornographic image as sym- bolic: “this picture of the body of one woman has become a metaphor, in its anonymity... . for all women’s bodies” (112). To read the sexual activity represented in the pornographic image as a totalizing symbol is to ignore its allegorical construction; as Benjamin puts it, “In the context of allegory the image is only a signature, only the monogram of an essence, not the essence itself in a mask” (214). We cannot tear off the mask and rescue the body underneath; what we see is writing, not truth. The gay porn allegory is an ob-scene or inverted scene, a utopian theater where sexual and textual pleasure take center stage, forcing truth and meaning into the wings. It is this violence that well-meaning critics seek to tame by calling for nicer pornography. But gay porn’s only usefulness lies in its uselessness, its excess. Notes I am indebted to David Gardner, with whom I prepared a seminar presentation on narrative structure in gay porn that was the genesis for this paper. Thanks also to Peter Wollen and Sam Weber for their help on various versions of the paper, and especially to Ed O'Neil for shepherding me along the entire process with innumerable and indis- pensable suggestions. Finally, a heartfelt thanks to Dan Fogg for mate- rial and emotional support. 1 Of course, one way the gay porn video can and does easily rein- troduce biologically determined difference in such a way as to limit (apparently) the play of identification is through the deployment of race. I don't mean to minimize this crucial and difficult issue by rele- gating it to a footnote, but some important work is being done in this area. See especially Richard Fung’s excellent “Looking For My Penis.” 2 Inasense, there is something obscene at the heart of all allegory, if we define allegory as the attempt to make visible thatwhich is hidden, to speak the unspeakable. Hence Hegel’s definition of allegory as the personification of an abstract condition. Hence also Fletcher's conten- tion that allegory “concerns itself with highly charged thematic con- cerns that must be subsumed under the heading, taboo” (208). Benjamin differentiates between the allegorical and the symbolic by pointing out that the symbol aspires to universality while “the allegor-168 Discourse 15.1 ical must constantly unfold in new and surprising ways” (188). Thus he concludes that allegories “become dated, because itis part of their nature to shock" (183) . Nothing dates faster than pornography. Works Cited Barthes, Roland. Sade/Fourier/Loyola. Trans. Richard Miller. 1976. Berkeley: U of California P, 1989. $/2. Trans, Richard Miller. New York: Farrar, 1974. Benjamin, Walter. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Trans. John ‘Osborne. 1977. London: Verso, 1985. de Man, Paul. “Aesthetic Formalization: Kleist’s Uber das Marionetten- theater.” The Rhetoric of Romanticism. New York: Columbia UP, 1984. 263-90. . Blindness and Insight. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983. Dyer, Richard. “Coming to Terms.” Out There: Marginalization and Con- temporary Culture. Ed. Russell Ferguson et. al. Cambridge: MIT P, 1990. 289-98, Fletcher, Angus. Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1964. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, ‘Trans. Robert Hurley. 1978. New York: Vintage, 1990. Fung, Richard. “Looking For My Penis.” How Do Look? Ed. Bad Object Choices. Seattle: Bay, 1991. 145-60. Griffin, Susan. Pornography and Silence: Culture’s Revenge Against Nature. New York: Harper, 1981. je tu il elle. Dir. Chantal Akerman. World Artists. 1974. Laplanche, Jean, and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis. “Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality.” 1964. Formations of Fantasy. Ed. Victor Burgin, James Donald, and Cora Kaplan. New York: Routledge, 1989. 5-34, Route 69. Dir. William Higgins, Catalina Video, 1984. Williams, Linda. Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible.” Berkeley: U of California P, 1989.