RE: Academic Wank and the conservative backlash

I disagree that he’s “preaching to the choir”, here.

There’s a substantial difference between what you’re calling a “symbol”—the intellectual tools of mathematics, for example—and what he’s calling one. What you’re talking about are more properly called “signs”, or “signifiers”.

Mathematical signs are important in what they reference, but completely unimportant in themselves. Symbols, like flags, take on emotional significance in themselves, having little or nothing to do with the thing for which the symbol stands.

The soldier who dies trying to prevent a flag from being captured is a good example. The flag, as a sign, is nothing more than an indicator of a country—presumably, in this case, which country currently holds a piece of ground in the battle. The capture of the flag is an emotionally significant symbol of loss. A soldier who risks his life to retrieve the flag while knowing that the ground will still be captured has missed the point of the sign.

But that emotional investment is pretty real. Consider the rhetoric from the Catholics last year when a student at the University of Central Florida kept the communion wafer he got at a mass.

Signs are unimportant—flags, holy crackers, or mathematical operators. They’re tools to help us think. But the line between thinking and feeling can be very fluid in some regions.

Davidcgore seems to favor the sort of continental school of philosophy that sees every sign as an emotionally powerful symbol, and seeks to assign even more power to them than they actually possess. It makes the error of mistaking the signifier for the signified at two levels: first, mistaking the original signifier, then mistaking signifiers as a class.