Symbolic Distortion

In a previous post - Finding the Symbolic - I said that communalism could be a way to re-establish symbolic distance into society. However, I never said what it was that corrupted or collapsed this symbolic distance in the first place. Todd McGowan, in The End of Dissatisfaction?, says that we have a command to enjoy in today's society, rather than the previous society of prohibition (which provided a barrier to enjoyment). So today, he says, the symbolic distance has collapsed.

I, on the other hand, would tend to agree with the likes of Slavoj Zizek and Karl Marx, who say that "the moment all commodities are exhangeable against money . . . all other commodities [other than money] undergo a 'transubstantiation' and start to function as the appearance of the universal Value embodied in money . . . (For They Know Not What They Do, pg. 21" It is not, then, a collapse of the symbolic but rather a distortion or corruption of it that we see occurring today. So part of what creates this is that we focus almost solely on the exchange value of an object today, losing the symbolic barrier that would allow an object to hold actual meaning for us.

-the ambassador