“යථාර්ථවාදය” චිත්‍ර ප්‍රදර්ශනය

In a number of places Lacan distinguishes between the real and reality. Reality, for Lacan, is a synthesis of the Imaginary and the Symbolic. Here it’s important to recall that the Imaginary does not signify the fictional or that which only exists in the imagination. Rather, the Imaginary refers to the regime of images that come to structure the body and the body’s relations to the world. Lacan’s thesis is that when we are born we experience our body as a chaotic and disjointed multiplicity without distinction between inside and outside. Through an identification with an image of our body seen from a second person perspective we form a unity for ourselves that forms as a telos for the integration and coordination of our body. This unified image is not what I am, but rather a vector I aspire to in the unification and coordination of my various drives and movements.

For Lacan this split between chaotic lived body (body experienced in the first-person) and body-image (second-person body as a unified image) is ineradicable such that I never quite coincide with the body-image that I aspire to be. Yet the regime of images pertains not only to my body, but also to the various objects that populate the world. A field of vectors emerges between my body and the various images that populate the world around me. The world, as it were, gradually becomes an oriented world. Thus, for example, I do not merely see the image of the table in front of me as a flat image, but rather see it as containing a reserve of other dimensions that I can act on in a variety of ways. I see it as having what Husserl called an “internal horizon”, as being composed of profiles, such that the image is not one dimension, but has unseen sides. These profiles are coordinated with my body in a lived space-time that I can walk about to actualize other unseen dimensions, that I can grasp, that I can manipulate in a variety of ways. These potential movements embodied in the images of things other than me are vectors of my own potential movement forming a system between body and object. Lacan explores this phenomenology of the Imaginary and the body-object system in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, providing a genetic account of how this system is gradually built up.

Yet this is not yet what Lacan calls “reality”. Reality is not simply the vector system of body-object, but also has a symbolic dimension. The symbolic, in its turn, structures this system in a system of relations and symbolic positions determining an “order of the world”. A properly symbolic relation refers to a positional system that is not itself founded on any qualitative property of objects themselves. Saussure gives the nice example of the “5 o’clock train”. The 5 o’clock train has nothing to do with the material properties of the train. From day to day different material trains can serve as the 5 o’clock train. The 5 o’clock train can arrive at 5:03 or 4:50 and still be the 5 o’clock train. Just as we would look in vain to find that material property of gold or a dollar bill that gives it value, we look in vain to find the “5 o’clockness” of the 5 o’clock train in its material properties. This is because the 5 o’clockness of the train is a pure symbolic and relational property. The train takes on this property through a symbolic system, not its physical features. The symbolic is this system of relational positions that aren’t founded in any way in the physical properties of an object. It is a sorting and structuring of the world into a system of positions that can be filled by a variety of different material entities while nonetheless retaining that symbolic identity (both George W. Bush and Obama are presidents, even though they are different material beings).

Reality, then, for Lacan, is this synthesis of the Imaginary and the Symbolic in a system where both orders reciprocally structure one another. Together they define a structured system of appearances, of manifestations, related to the human body and the symbolic social order. Within this order manifestations are structured in the Imaginary by the body-object vectoral system of appearances and the symbolic system that ascribes a symbolic position or place for all persons and entities that exist. It is also here, incidentally, that we get the logic of sovereignity explored by Agamben and Schmitt. The symbolic system assigning places is itself without foundations. Think of the way people often talk about dictionaries. Two people get in a dispute about what a word means. One person runs to the dictionary and says “well the dictionary says x!” The dictionary is treated as a sovereign authority that fixes meaning. The truth is that the dictionary only gets its authority from a community of speakers (i.e., the people involved in debate and that use language), yet there seems to be a nearly ineluctable transcendental illusion wherein we place an authority over and above the community of speakers, a source of meaning, that fixes meaning: A transcendent origin of meaning. We see a similar logic at work in the social field. Endlessly we search for a supplemental figure to fix and tame the foundationlessness of social reality: a sovereign king, a master figure, God, the father, etc.[Speculative dimension of reality] We erect a kinship system to secure origins. It was this supplemental fiction of a transcendent guarantee that Lacan tried to formalize in the masculine side (the left hand side above) of his graphs of sexuation. The masculine side of the graph of sexuation is the formal schema of all onto-theology, sovereignity, oligarchy, and theism.

The real, by contrast, is something entirely different in Lacan. The real, as Lacan repeats endlessly, is not reality (the correlational system and synthesis of the imaginary and the Symbolic), but rather is that which is both in excess of all reality and that which evades all reality. The real is that which is without place in reality. It is a strange sort of placelessness, for it simultaneously 1) is invisible from the standpoint of reality, yet nonetheless 2) the “system of reality” strives to gentrify and eradicate the real (in Television Lacan will cryptically pronounce that “reality is the grimace of the real”), and 3) the real, despite being invisible, nonetheless appears but in a way inimical to the vector body-object system of the Imaginary and the sorting-organizing system of the symbolic. The real is a placeless appearance.