Today Brian Williams interviewed Barack Obama and asked him about bowling in Pennsylvania, wearing a tie and rolling (is that the word?) the ball in the gutter. Obama smiled and said that he had dropped by a bowling alley to talk to "folks," and everyone was having a good time, so they urged him to bowl a couple rounds. He had, for the first time in many years. Then the media got a hold of it and suddenly it became a "signifier," he said, of his being out of touch with working-class people.
I remember when hipster intellectuals in New York, influenced by Lacan or the Frankfurt School, or Leo Strauss, for all I knew, began using the word "signifier" instead of "symbol" 20 years ago. They slipped it into fancy conversation, sometimes they even slipped it into fancy journalism. I still don’t understand exactly what it means. I’m sure Obama does. He’s a Harvard intellectual. And no that doesn’t mean he can’t represent working-class people.
