Dear L.K.: the ‘real’

Get ready for your mind to be blown.

We have talked a bit now about ‘representation’. We have talked about art, a little bit about math, about truth, among other things. We have used a lot of language, that’s for sure. Just look at all these words! But there is something that I just can’t get at with language. I have been trying for a while now. What is this thing I am striving to explain, to articulate in some way? I think I found it. Well, not really. I can never find it, I can only desire it in hopes of one day replacing this lacking feeling.

It is the ‘real’.

And language just ain’t gonna get us there.

I told you I can’t get Lacan out of my head. Like a good Kylie Minogue song. I won’t go into it too much right this very moment, mainly due to time and space, but I will reference his Möbius strip model of conceptualization. Just for kicks.

The Möbius strip, you know, this thing:

You know, the one where if an ant was to crawl along the length of it, it would return to its starting point having marched on both sides of the paper without ever crossing an edge.

You know, the one Escher showed us.

Yeah, that one.

Well, Lacan used the Möbius strip as a model to illustrate the way psychoanalysis conceptualizes certain binary oppositions (such as inside/outside, past/present) and enables us to see them as continuous with each other. They are one in the same.

The Möbius strip can also help us think about Lacan’s three orders: the real, the imaginary and the symbolic. In a nutshell (a seriously small nutshell) the real is the state of nature that we have been forever disconnected upon our entrance into language. Because it is impossible to return to this state, we experience a sense of loss or lack, which in turn breeds desire. This desire leads us to the imaginary (where fantasy lives and where I often live as of late), and where the ‘ideal’ self is created in order to compensate for the sense of lack. Imaginary, check. What about the symbolic? The symbolic is about language and narrative- it is how we percieve reality through the filter of societal and lingustic conventions. In short, by the time we ever experience anything ‘for real’, it has been processed by the symbolic order thereby creating a distance and lack that gives way to desire for the real, which in turn influences the way we see ourselves in our ‘ideal world’.

Phew… Ok, bare with me, I think this is maybe going somewhere.

In summary, according to Lacan, we experience our ‘reality’ through the symbolic, the social world of linguistic communication and knowledge of ideological conventions, and the imaginary, the fantasy images created by the human subject of both him/herself and his/her object of desire.

The ‘real’ is impossible to experience, especially through language.

But we REALLY want to experience it.

And, so what? Well, this is what makes the world go round (so to speak). And, this is where the Möbius strip analogy comes into play. 

The Möbius strip shows this idea in many ways. If one side of the strip represents the symbolic and one side represents the imaginary, we can see that the two sides are intertwined; they occupy different spaces in theory but they are also infinitely connected. We can not identify where one ends and another one begins. We know that somewhere, there is a twist. This twist in the Möbius strip, the one that we can never fully see and/or articulate, is the ‘real’. We know it is there, we want to figure it out, but it is impossible. There are times when we feel close, and ‘the stain of the real’ appears. This is usually when major things happen. There is a change in everything. But then we realize, the lack is still there and a new desire is created. A desire to experience something ‘real’. And so, we continue to march along, just like Escher’s ants.

This, for me, explains a lot. I know it’s not necessarily the ‘truth’ but it does get at issues of representation and signification- things about which we have already spoken.

This quote kinda sums it up:

“For the signifier is a unit in its very uniqueness, being by nature symbol only of an absence. ” Jacques Lacan