On the Political and the Symbolic: Against the Metaphysics of Textuality

Much of most interesting theoretical work in contemporary cultural studies concerns relation between political and symbolic. Some of this work aims, for example, to devise interpretive paradigms capable of foregrounding political significance of symbolic practices, whether conceived as textual, discursive or ideological practices. Other such work aims, conversely, to construct models which focalize symbolic or signifying dimensions of more narrowly political, social-institutional practices. In either case, focus may be on the center or on the peripheries; object of interpretation may be texts of high culture or humbler forms of discourse or both in interrelation; likewise, political object may be institutional centers of power or wider and more diffuse political practices of everyday life, or again, two in relation to one another. Moreover, there is also a large body of meta-theoretical work aimed at clarifying political implications of various first-order paradigms of cultural and social interpretation. But whatever vector of analysis, relation to center, or order of theorization, most salient issue, in some form or another, is usually relation between political and symbolic. This is common thread running through otherwise diverse projects of writers like Jacques Derrida and Juliet Mitchell, Julia