On Sun, 14 Feb 1999, Ken Hanly wrote: > However, I would like to know how this (Butler type) analysis is of > practical use. It's quite simple: we all agree that late capitalism sucks, that the System is oppressive and evil, and that ordinary folks are being screwed. So why don't those people rebel? Why don't we have three, four, ten different Left parties out there canvassing for change? How does Capital rule and why does it rule so damn effectively? The phallus is the symbol of authority, not the authority itself; it's like bank credit, a claim on some future exchange-value not yet in existence. As Marxists we can assume *nothing* about identity -- the people will *not necessarily* rise in the streets once they know The Truth, or hear a few radical comments, or read a pamphlet. We have to work with identity, tussle with it, analyze it, resist it (and resist Capital through it). > As I understand it, Lacan interprets Freud's concepts of psychic > "condensation" and "displacement" in terms of linguisitic concepts of > metaphor and metonymy. This provides a niche market for academics > to get into the psychoanalytical business even though they are in literature or > critical theory or communications theory. And how is political discourse itself *not* a niche market? That's why the bourgeois parties do fundraising, hire flacks, and get their PR salespeople on cable TV, right? Lacan is also talking about this shift away from direct power-relations and towards more mediated ones -- he talks a lot about the Symbolic and the Real, which are deeply politicized things (just ask Time-Warner and Disney). A Left politics worthy of the name can't avoid these contradictions, it must think them through. -- Dennis
