To get a closer look at "noise," the real from which symbols rescue us, I'll imagine I'm a wardrobe in Jacques Lacan's vestibule, waiting to be gazed at, judged and impressed. Like everyone else I'm struggling with a "lack" of some sort, an unfilled hole that needs content.
Currently I'm very disappointed in the Scottish Breeks that arrived in the mail, which really don't suit my Tyrolean Tracht Loden and makes my boiled wool Alpine hunting hat look unconvincing. There's a color clash I think, which could respond better to the bloom of heather on a windswept moor than to a vacuumed carpet and a ticking clock.
Jacques has reminded me more than once that moments of uncomfortable noisiness are bound to be alarming. The quality of unknown in the real always is, but I was to rest assured that while my wardrobe remained wholly preoccupied with maintaining the "why" and "wherefore" of my existence, in no way was it the irreducible fact of my existence. What remained of that was littering the floor of my dressing room.
Of course I sometimes wonder whether the aesthetics in the world of my Symbolic Order leave Jacques a little mystified. Like most of his generation Lacan did his uncomfortable time with Hegel's dialectics. Came away with his two objects representing an asymmetry, the one defining the other, the resulting tension producing a direction rather than an impasse. He called this direction "Drive."
His "what about you" was the assertion that the big, bold, object, the image around which my person has been shellacked in place was waiting in his vestibule, what I wanted to be was the other little object, it was waiting upstairs where I lived on the dressing room floor.
