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.
