> I think it best to avoid organic metaphors to describe "society."
Best for whom?
How do you distinguish between the writings of a lunatic and those of a poet? I'm just curious.
> "Society" is not an individual organism writ large.
Agreed, individuals are society writ large.
> Organic metaphors obscure contradictions in social relations and ideology.
They attribute to what exists a false sense of monolithic wholeness.
Wholeness is an organic metaphor. You just lost your object of criticism. In other words, your argument has no teeth.
> If concrete individuals were merely "members" of a social "organism," why
would it be wrong to amputate diseased "members" to save "the body politic"?
That's not what I'm saying. One would only amputate (insert the use of a medical metaphor here) "diseased members" (your phrase, not mine) by attempting to actualize a utopian project which requires scapegoats (ie. I love socialism, which is why I must destroy this capitalist world so that the new socialist order can be created)(I love you [this world that will be socialist]... *means* I hate you [this capitalist world which ought to be socialist]). We have to be careful how we fashion our perspectives... and forbidding adjectives isn't going to help much if we don't address the logic behind the lexicon. Markovic (a one time member of the Belgrade praxis school - co-founder of the journal Praxis) wrote a rather nice book, a good critique of the passivity of affluent society... then he designed the theoretical architecture for Milosovic's Serbia. Apparently, without much notice (the book, From Affluence to Praxis was introduced by Erich Fromm) he failed to mention the dangers of nationalism... So we need to be careful, very careful, when we limit what we're going to talk about and how we're going to talk about it. I would have thought that the project of democracy is about political conflict, not the elimination of conflict. Unless, of course, you are taking on a polemic role for the express purpose of generating conflict - in which case - let's continue to dance.
> Surely it would be just and expedient to "correct the deformed parts" to
improve the "health" of the "whole"?
But that would violate my M.O. - the objective articulation of suffering is the condition of all truth (Adorno).
> Are they not the kind of social hygienic measures of biopolitics that
Foucault, a gay man, spent his life examining and criticizing?
Foucault was gay? See what you did there.
This is all rather pointless, we can agrue ad nauseum about how 'society' should be described. You'll probably use the term ideology (from ideas, which is an organic metaphor strictly speaking) and I'll use both ideology and imaginary significations. You'll talk about class struggle and I'll wax about the politics of impossibility. You might use terms like base and superstructure and I'll talk about nodal points... "false consciousness" vs. psychosis - criminal vs. perverse - violent vs. phallic - political economy vs. indivisible remainders ... whatever. It isn't so much as these ideas are locked in some pro/anti relation, more like they *both* fail to capture reality. We all see things slightly differently, and no one of us has a better sense of reality than another. Reality eludes us, because we're part of it.
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