>I'll wager five posts from know you'll be using
>organic /medical metaphors - and I'm sure that you will, eventually, agree in
>the inherent correctness of such an approach, even if you don't happen to
>side
>with Lacan or Freud.
I think it best to avoid organic metaphors to describe "society." As I argued in my posts on Habermas, I think that organicism is a dialectical twin of individualism. "Society" is not an individual organism writ large. "Culture" cannot be usefully examined if it is seen as a giant version of an individual mind. Organic metaphors obscure contradictions in social relations and ideology. They attribute to what exists a false sense of monolithic wholeness.
Moreover, political implications of an organicist philosophy include a denial of concrete individuals' practical freedoms & desires or a fatalistic acquiescence to such denial (Freud's _Civilization and Its Discontents_ is a good example of such acquiescence). If concrete individuals were merely "members" of a social "organism," why would it be wrong to amputate diseased "members" to save "the body politic"? Surely it would be just and expedient to "correct the deformed parts" to improve the "health" of the "whole"?
Are they not the kind of social hygienic measures of biopolitics that Foucault, a gay man, spent his life examining and criticizing?
Yoshie