With all the recent interest in Lacan, I was wondering if anyone could
help me with an Althusserian (and hence semi-Lacanian) question.

I was recently trying to write a passage about how pornography "hails" an
individual for whom any given material is pornographic (since not all
pornography is pornographic for all people), and I was struck by the fact
that I seemed to be rewriting Althusser's essay "Ideology and Ideological
State Apparatuses."  A moment's reflection convinced me that pornography,
in fact, could usefully be looked at as a form of erotic ideology.  I'm
not just refering to battles between Larry Flynt and Congress.  I think
certain Althusserian formulations about ideology apply very well to
pornography:

Take, for instance, obviousness.  According to Althusser, ideology
(insofar as we are "living in the 'truth' of it") makes us cry out:
"That's obvious! That's right!" "That's true!"  Just so for pornography
for the individual who finds that material pornographic.  The excited
individual doesn't ask, "Am I excited by this?"  The answer--the familiar
itch--is too obvious.

According to Althusser (and here he is borrowing from Lacan), "ideology
represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real
conditions of existence."  Just so, pornography represents the imaginary
relationship of individuals to the real conditions of sexuality.  Take the
case of a foot fetishist with a taste for female amputees.  He claimed
that looking at a one-legged girl was "like looking at her genital, it's
pornographic."  By representing an imaginary female phallus and imaginary
castration (I mean imaginary in both the traditional and in the Lacanian
sense), the fetishist constructs imaginary female genitalia
(phallic/castrated) to shore up his imaginary relationship to sexual
difference by warding off the imaginary threat of castration.

If such an apparently simple act as shaking hands in the street can be
ideological for Althusser, I think the same could be argued for
masturbating to a piece of porngraphy.  Of course, I realize that
Althusser's point about ideology is that it plays a crucial role in
reproducing the relations of production.  But what is pornography all
about if not reproducing the relations of (sexual) (re)production?  This
could be taken literally in any number of cases, but also in a more
political sense, since the sexual stereotypes encapsulated and perpetuated
in pornography keep the glass ceiling intact and polished.

What really interests me about Althusser, though, is his theory of
"hailing" or "interpellation" whereby the individual's status as a subject
is created and perpetuated and reinforced by ideology.  Something quite
similar, of course, happens with pornography.  Here I think we have to
correct Althusser's reading of the Lacanian mirror phase from which he
derives this notion.  As Althusser recognized, for an individual to
recognize the object that hails and "subjects" him, that individual must
already be a subject--which certainly raises troubling problems with
Althusser's entire insistence upon the concept of hailing.  But if what is
at stake is the status of the *ego*, not the *subject*--and this, I
think, corrects Althusser's reading of Lacan--then to speak of an ego
being formed in a dialectical relationship with an object puts ideology
and pornography squarely (?) into transitional space.

Anyway, my question (and I do have one) is this.  Am I reinventing the
wheel?  Does anyone know of any Althusserian readings of pornography?
Also (I'm hardly an expert on Althusser), am I way off base n any of my
claims?

Thanks!

Best,
        --Carl

Carl Eby
Department of American Thought & Language
Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI 48840
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