In Sublime Object of Ideology, Zizek has this to say about the gap between Imaginary and Symbolic identification:
"This gap is brought to its extreme with the obsessional neurotic: on the 'constituted' imaginary, phenomenol level he is of course caught in the masochistic logic of compulsive acts, he is humiliating himself, preventing his success, organizing his failure and do on; but the crucial question is again how to locate the vicious, superego gaze for which he is humiliating himself, for which this obsessional organizing of failure procures pleasure.'
The Symbolic point of identification is thus the place from which we are seen and to which our 'performances' are addressed. It is the 'perspective from which he [the neurotic or whoever] is observing himself and judging his activity'. An obvious and concrete illustration of this Symbolic place would be Renaissance court theatre, where the priviliged spectator was the king - the rest of the audience watched the king watching the play, and the actors addressed their Imaginary roles to this Symbolic place.
Now, Time of the Barmecides responds to an attack on the Tomb with this encapsulation of the 'political project' of Harry's Place
to endlessly plead before an imaginary tribunal, packed with neo-cons/ assorted members of the Right. This tribunal tirelessly, and with the immense ideological and economic resources at its disposal, accuses the Left of predictable crimes and complicities. HP's principle aim is to exonerate itself before this tribunal by placing before it endless examples of Left-wing venality. Secondly, it seeks to occupy and re-tread a terrain of argument mapped out for it in advance by the Right. It scuttles obediently back and forth between the points of this circumscribed territory, reiterating that this is indeed the correct and proper terrain..
If this were simply about an one rather tedious and mypoic blog it wouldn't be worth quoting. What it says seems rather to indicate a more general capitulation among many so-called left of centre bloggers and journalists. In what follows, then, let 'Harry's Place' refer not to a blog but to a structural position or place of enunciation, a place which Harry and others have chosen to occupy.
'Mangan' raises the question of the implicit audience to which a blog (etc) is addressed. There are people, nominally of the left, who seem acutely aware of the way in which the left is seen, and of the 'charges' made against the left. They are consequently keen to shake off this disfiguring perception, to exempt themselves from the charges by demonstrating that they are particularly vigilant in condemning what the left stands accused of. Such people might be compared to those intellectuals who are always sneering at 'intellectuals' and the 'intelligentsia' for their lack of contact with the real world or other familiar and well-rehearsed items from the charge sheet drawn up by Common Sense. Nothing is at stake in these tired polemics, nothing is achieved. Their writings are little more than symbolic rituals staged for the gaze of Rightist received wisdom. This external gaze, the place from which they are observed, is what they have always already identified with. It is this idenitification which castrates their thought and renders it spectacular and banal.
Superficially, 'Harry's Place' is caught between nominal identification with the left and effective identification with a Rightist agenda. But there is no contradiction here if we bear in mind the difference between Imaginary and Symbolic identification (above). The 'Imaginary' Left identity is signified by the retro Soviet iconography etc of HP. This 'left' is little more than the shrivelled visual remains of now lost Revolutionary possibilities which we need not take the trouble to try and re-invent. (Thinking through what it might mean to reinvent such possibilities is of course the very last thing that HP would be interested in.) It is the Left as a style and as a set of vague connotations. So much for Imaginary identification. All this begs the question - For whom is the left little more than hammer and sickle icons, the colour red, retro Soviet posters etc. It is of course the Right who regard the Left as little more than empty slogans and iconography. The Right and/ or the advertising industry and the Spectacle itself. And these are the audiences for which HP performs its symptoms. These symptoms will not be eradicated through rational argument, their tenacity derives from the way they constitute the very identity of HP, the very place from which they speak.
There is a Lacanian question which has a colloquial English equivalent - 'why are you telling me this?'. It's a question that recognises that over and above the content of an enunciation is another message, a plea or address which is the real raison d'etre of the utterance, such that to stick with the ostensible content misses the mark. What emerges here is 'the persistence of a gap between utterance and its enunciation: at the level of utterance you're telling me this, but what do you want to tell me with it, through it?'. Addressing the content of HP on its own terms fails to account for the obsessively narrow and repetitive nature of that content, the glaring omissions, the conspicous absence of a critique of capitalism and the conceptual armoury of such a critique.. it is such repetitions and omissions which need to be read, symptomatically. In this sense, there is no point in concerning yourself with the utterances of HP, you need only diagnose their place of enunciation. Anything else, and perhaps even this, is a culpable waste of finite energies. To join in polemical games with such people is foolish. As someone once said to me, the only way to win such games is not to play.
(That the element of humour in this post was missed most spectacularly by its target is entirely as it should be).