Thanks, Doug - not an easy definition for the likes of me to grasp, but one
that seems to dissolve before the eyes the more one tries to nag it into
showing itself.  Allow me to aspire to the role of devil's advocate - not
too happy with a couple of my four points, but I'll chuck 'em in anyway.

(1)  The symbolic value of the penis seems to rest on some hegemonic idea
that its presence implies wholeness and its absence some sort of
incompleteness.  So the phallus acts as an includer and an excluder, along
hierarchical lines.  What worries me is that Freud's theorising about little
girls being ignorant of their genitals is pretty central to the case he
brings.  It occurs to me that little girls (a) quickly work out something of
interest lies below, and (b) stand a good chance of being far more ignorant
of the existence of penises.  She wouldn't think them into existence without
some pretty explicit clues, so she normalises her own physical being.  When
Dad waltzes past in the nude one day, she perceives for the first time that
some people are a departure from the norm ... like her dad.  She does not
strike me as someone who fears, regrets, or even contemplates castration. 
So Freud's theory, at best, would be about girls occasionally imagining a
supplementation to her normalised physical being - its status would be that
of an accessory, no?  And accessories are not reference points - the
reference point is what they are an accessory to.

(2)  As signifier of desire, the phallus would tend to a rather one-sided
notion of desire, no?  I often suspect male and female sexual desire, as
experiences, are closer to each other than we think (lustful lasses, now
that they happily give voice on such matters,  sound a lot like lustful lads
to me), but of course I can but surmise.  But nevertheless, deploying one's
genitals is a part of the asspiration - mebbe not as locally focussed in the
female anticipation as in the male - but enough to colour the desire.  The
owner of a vagina would be anticipating a moment qualitatively different
from what the owner of the penis would be looking forward to.  As Freud was
a boy, and of his time, he may have been overly inclined to generalise from
the specific.

(3)  And one reason for all those antiquities highlighting penises as
symbols of (we can but guess what from syntagmatic context) is that a symbol
must lend itself to stylisation without risk of confusing meaning - penises
are better for that than vaginas.  Furthermore, if I were a man within a
mode of production (say, the stone age) or complex of relations (say tribal
or imperial warfare) that accorded my sex apparent primacy, I'd be inclined
to be the more likely to produce religious art (not a job for lesser beings)
and I'd be inclined to see in my sex the representation of all that is best
about us - the penis being the most convenient mark for
man-as-representative-of-human.  

Were I a child of perhaps the most sexually hung-up period in human history
(as was friend Freud), I'd go absolutely nuts - happily projecting my every
fantasy and worry at these icons of actually incommensurable otherness.

Were I a child of the information age, whether boy or girl, different
associations and very different statuses would come to mind, I'm sure.    

(4)  Now we come to the girl's wish to receive the father's phallus.  Where
on earth does Freud get this from?  Firstly, the girl may have no idea
penises exist.  Secondarily, it wouldn't necessarily occur to her how one
might be deployed (I still remember being profoundly stunned by this news
myself, and I already knew half of us were innies and the other half
outies).  She ain't gonna fantasise about anything her situation hasn't
clued her up on.  

Summing up to the jury:  We're not talking psychology here - we're talking
sociology.  We can not invent body parts we've never seen, we can not invent
absences of same, so we can't aspire to them or fear their transience.  They
come to us in discourse, and must therefore always arrive prepackaged.  And
I doubt a mum or a dad is gonna come in and say, 'look, darling - this is
desire and domination ... the object of reverence and envy, a sign of our
incompleteness as women, the focus of our wanting and the badge of power. 
Thought you might like to take the notion of it with you in case you feel
the need to mobilise some discourse in the play of identity.'   

We may accept Dennis and Ange's concerns with the play between capitalism
and identity without confusing matters by trying to introduce a sorta monad
like this - one that just ain't up to the job of supporting a narrative of
any weight.

As Derrida reminded us, signifiers give rise to an infinite array of
possible secondary signifiers - there is no fixed signified - and a fluid
phallus is no phallus at all.

Dicks are yesterday's news.  What's left of the phallus might be just enough
to wrap around some fish'n'chips.  

Er, interesting imagery, that ...

Cheers,
Rob.



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