Lacan, The Real, Reality, The Other and James Joyce

Sigmund Freud's Couch.

Huffstutter 2004

 I know Baxter wants to get away from Jacques Lacan. Myself I'd like to shore up an understanding of what Lacan means by Real.

In the course of a person's lifetime, meanings gather moss as they gain shades and layers. A mind  can easily hold fast to a spot on the symbolic order, think it rather cute and pour stuff into it, imagine our world without retard, puerile and cretin, which you just can't do with sums. The thing is, in Lacan's way of looking at it, there's a distinction to be made between Reality and The Real. Far from there being two distinct words to mark the difference in a manageable way, real is all bundled into real.

In short, for Lacan, "Reality" is the world we have built using symbols and images. "The Real" is everything else. Sounds far too easy and a little pointless until you adjust the meanings a little by suggesting: "The story of reality can be changed, The Real can't." Then you might be persuaded to ask: "Does The Real care about me?" The answer to that is: "No sirree! But Reality does its best to try."

Indeed, lo and behold, all of reality has been built on the idea of making you and I happy, and if not happy, then at least constructively motivated.

Being an ambitions male with a lifestyle to maintain, Our Man Jacques Lacan quickly concluded that Freud was absolutely right, when it comes to hardcore mental imbalance, morbid unhappiness, intermittent explosive disorder or whatever you wanted to call it, there were certainly reputations to be made but there was no actual cure for the fundamental Human Condition.

But he had noticed that in the wider society we people spent an inordinate amount of time in a pursuit which because he grew up proper he might have phrased this way: "Colluding to adapt to social norms." This collusion, he ventured to observe, had its casualties, but without the moral support of other gossiping idolaters we would all become casualties of The Real and under those circumstances where would reliable help come from.

There might be no cure for those whom the Symbolic World, Reality, had failed to embrace with the sort of love and appreciation that fills the void and makes it possible to dramatically reduce contact with The Real. But in terms of symbol making, an "I" that sat alone on a bench staring at the Liffey River and listening to the ducks, might find solace in dreaming of his dressing room, hunting around for the material out of which to make symbols that better suited him.

For Lacan that would require a person to accept "The Real" as real and "Reality" as an order of symbols, some of which made no sense whatsoever. For James Joyce it was developing a writing style that was "famously experimental and complex" that would challenge the professors of the English Literature, or it was "pretentious, overly difficult, deliberately obscure and fragmented" that rescued him from losing his mind to the isolation of preferring the company of park benches to the company of people.

Love affairs with Triadic Structures

Latch

 Today, as we wait for the Spring Marsh Frogs to sing, our little group intends to poke a finger or two at the Triadic Structure. Or, if you prefer to be a folksy political type desperate for the authenticity of the roots you never had, a three legged stool.

The off putting thing about Hegel's Triadic Structure was that one of the asymmetries was prepared to die rather than be wrong. The asymmetry that would have preferred to die than submit was referred to as the master and the more magnanimous asymmetry was referred to as the slave or in more enlightened times referred to as the servant.

The third leg of this triadic structure, which eventually became called the Synthesis, was like a melding of the two asymmetries into some sort of compromise which in time would become yet another asymmetry. Not an easy compromise to make and it would have been impossible had it not been for a flaw within the asymmetry that had a death wish, he wanted his wonderfulness to be recognized, and  over the generations the master and servant were able, for mutual advantage, to recognize each other as self-conscious beings, and this produced a mutual recognition out of which, often through conflict, a synthesis, a new direction, emerged.

For Hegel, his Triadic Structure had nailed it, everyone else could go home, and in the same way that Kant's version of the Enlightenment had predicted the End of History, Hegel was confident his own Phenomenology of Spirit was actually how the End of History would happen.

Hegel probably had a point he wanted to drum home when he assigned master/servant to the two asymmetries in his triad. He wanted to have one asymmetry dominant, raw in tooth and claw, otherwise nothing would get done, no one would obey anyone else, the harvests wouldn't be harvested and so on. A closer appreciation of Hegel's meanings include the idea of union between asymmetries that included recognition and the desire to be recognized.

When Lacan attended lectures on Hegel's phenomenology in Paris, he grasped this area of desire and recognition and saw a much subtler complexity. He concluded that master and servant misidentified the forces at play. The desire for a Pork Chop on a stick might be a need for sustenance, but a desire for a chunky soled Kleman Pador Tyrolean walking shoe was a desire for recognition. It was an adornment, part of the wardrobe. And if indeed the servant had a master, his master was the wardrobe that presented his self image to the world. And here Lacan introduced his own Triadic Structure.

In Lacan's Triad, the Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary are three interlocked rings, and all is well as long as the symbolic remains a master worth following. Then, should the imagery no longer supply the symbolic with a path through the real, bam, you got neurosis and pharmaceutical makers have 20 percent of their manufacturing capacity. There's also a chance that your whole Tyrolean wardrobe thing might be showing signs of disintegrating, your neurosis becomes a compunction which turns psychotic the next thing you got a problem with too many skeletons in the basement.

Lacan, being French, referred to these symptoms as sinthomes and while struggling through James Joyce who he judged to be a very difficult writer he concluded that Joyce wasn't writing for other people, he had no desire to impress them with a new take on the literary equivalent of Tyrolean Brocade, he was writing for his own sanity, no one else. He was scouring the floor of his dressing room, gathering bits and pieces, including his shames and his soiled underpants and through his writing he was using them to symbolically complete himself by desperately trying to keep his three rings in some sort of working order.

Jacques Lacan's Drive and Hegel's influence on tension between asymmetries.

70 F. Jan 9th, 2026 Maple Pollen? 

 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. 

Objet Petit A

Mobius Strip

 We've talked a lot about Jacques Lacan. We have to realize he died in 1981 when he was 80. Stuff has happened in Neuroscience and those sort of areas since the simpler and infinitely more comprehensible times. One of the topics Lacan put high priority on was the moments when a person started developing a self image.

For Lacan this idea of self image was an attempt to make yourself into  a mirror image a bigger and more confident other. You built it as a protection against the terror of reality. All very well being frightfully clever but an honest appraisal of a self in the world, for Lacan, was an absolute recipe for anti-social, psychotic behaviors.

There were two sorts of images, or others for Lacan. He thought of these others as objects. The one object was a mirror image of what you as a person decided you needed and wanted to be in order to fit into the world as best you could.  You could look at yourself in this mirror and judge your progress. The other other, the other object, which he called objet petit a, was what you'd left behind of yourself in the process of turning yourself into something that mirrored this wonderful image of yourself. Good looking, tall, successful, fun to be around....

Let's just say, for the sake of argument, that to manage the day to day you'd turned yourself into a very fine, highly polished Wardrobe. Everyone loved it, envied it, though it was great. Your other object, the objet petit a, would be the sawdust, waste wood, unfinished cans of varnish and cigarette butts you'd left laying around, or hidden away somewhere.

Oh sure, the Jung's of this world could go on about the archetypes around which a desperate and self conscious self could model itself, and Jung did mention shadows, which is what he called his cigarette butts and sawdust, being an ominous presence in the psyche. Lacan, in his model, put much more than a mere shadow into his objet petit a, his other other.

First of all, Lacan didn't want people messing with what he'd called his other other. He wanted it written and understood just as it was. Objet petit a, as far as he was concerned, was as good as an algebraic formulation.

Secondly the objet petit a, would always be a remainder, it was definitely a left over bit of reality that both the conscious and the unconscious could sense. But for Lacan, the moment we people started using symbols to make a language that tried to enable us to communicate with the object petit a, this other other, like a vampire, would remain outside the mirror, it couldn't be trapped by language, it was for ever a lurking misfortune, an unwanted appendage. And yet, no doubt about it, there was something in the periphery that refused to be ignored, it was lurking around, making the odd wistful sound that verged on whimpering, it had some sort of point to make that lay outside the Symbolic Order, so probably best to prescribe Quaaludes.

Finally, the objet petit a, this other other, means we can never be whole, our mirror, when we looked into it to check progress would never reflect what we'd become