“Identification then becomes a process of imaginative wish fulfillment which can be, and is, criticized from at least two points of view. The moralists criticize it on the grounds that it is mere escapism, and in encouraging people to imagine a better existence for themselves discourages them from working to achieve it in reality. At the other end of the spectrum, the ideologists argue that identification is the process whereby the values of the dominant ideology are naturalized into the desires, almost the instincts, of the individual, and are thus endlessly reproduced and perpetuated.”

“On the other hand, identification as a relationship of audience to performance disguised the arbitrarily constructed nature of the performance and encouraged the audience to experience the representation as though it were the real, and, in particular, to see characters as individually real people. This blurring of the distinction between the representation and the real disguised the fact that people and incidents were on stage to perform ideologically determined actions and made them appear as innocent, objective relections of reality. It made them appear prodcuts of nature, not of culture.Identification encouraged the audience to share the experiences and emotions of the characters and thus produced a feeling audience, not a thinking one, an accepting not an interrogative one, and one that understood incidents and actions through individual experience rather than through a sociopolitical framework.”

“It’s easy to criticize from the stands. What’s hard…is doing something.It’s not just that people like to criticize other people, it’s that they like to criticize other people when they haven’t achieved much themselves.”

“However, I have also argued for allegory’s positive effects. It is a process that typically takes control away from the author of a narrative and gives it to the reader. It is the reader who decides whether to interpret writing on a literal or a symbolic level. In giving greater control to the reader, allegory allows for imaginative and reflective analyses of mythology, and for its ideological purposes to be criticized, as well as affirmed.”

“Imagine a culture in which everything is geared toward helping all individuals become the best human beings they can be; in which individuals are driven to devoting their lives to becoming enlightened by the natural flood of compassion for others that arises from their wisdom.”

“culture comes into play at precisely the point where biological individuals become subjects, and that what lies between the two is not some automatically constituted ‘natural’ process of socialization but much more complex processes of formation”