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.
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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. 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.
It is for this reason that Lacan will say, in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, that the real is a “missed encounter”. The imaginary-symbolic system that constitutes reality is a system of anticipations in our ongoing dealings with the world. A missed encounter is precisely a contingent encounter that is not predelineated in any way by this anticipatory system. It is an appearance of the impossible (Lacan will also say that the real is the impossible) within the field of the “possible”. Of course, the possible here is that system predelineated by the “reality-system” or the synthesis of the symbolic and the imaginary. The Real is the appearance of the inapparent, of the anarchic excess beneath the reality-system, of that which has no place.
It is the real, not reality, that OOO aims at. When Harman argues that objects are radically withdrawn, he is proposing a gap between any and every manifestation of objects (what he calls “sensual objects”) and their existence proper. Every object is in excess of its being-for the reality system of entities. Put differently, all objects are irreducible to their appearing-for. There is always an excess, an inapparance, that evades the correlational system of reality. And it is for this reason that objects always harbor, to use Harman’s language, a volcanic potential to surprise or to constitute a “missed encounter” or encounter that evades all symbolic-imaginary systems of anticipation. OOO is a realism of the real, not reality. OOO realism aims at what Timothy Morton has called the “strange stranger” or that paradoxical inapparent appearing, that which cannot appear at all, at the heart of all entities. It is precisely this inapparent appearing that Harman underlines in his theory of metaphor that marks the paradox at the heart of all objects: their tension between their qualities or manifestations and their being. All objects are in excess of their appearingness.
Returning to my critique of political realism from a few days ago, political realism is always an attempt to instantiate a closure of reality. What it aims for is a “politics” of reality against a politics of the real. This closure consists in a restriction of being to reality, to the system of appearance defining places and positions of the beings involved in a system, that strives to erase the anarchic and contingent ground of this order, thereby hoping to eradicate the eruption of the real. Its fiction is that all those entities involved in the situation have clearly defined and counted identities and positions that can be smoothly calculated and managed in a governmental decision process. Yet to establish this, political realism must perpetually have recourse to the logic Lacan outlines in the masculine side of the graph of sexuation, pointing to a supplementary sovereign, God, natural order, king, charismatic leader, transcendent authority, etc., that covers or veils the absence of foundation, the excess, upon which reality is contingently founded, fixing this order. Political realism’s thesis is always that 1) all entities involved are counted and accounted for, and 2) that no other order is possible. Of course, this order also disguises the fact that the interests it claims to be in everyone’s interests are really the interests of a few. In repressing this anarchic and contingent ground of the reality system, political realism thereby promotes the lie that such and such a course of action is the only possible course of action, the only thing that can be done. As Naomi Klein showed so nicely in The Shock Doctrine, political realism manufactures crisis as a way of forcing the demos to accept their exploitation as the only way to avoid catastrophe.
If “politics” must be placed in square quotes when discussing political realism, then this is because political realism is not really a politics at all, but is rather mere administration (in all the terms literal and connotative senses). Insofar as political realism treats all elements as counted and accounted for, insofar as it treats all possibilities as pre-delineated in the anticipatory system of reality, “politics” becomes mere administration in determining which vectors should be pursued in these pre-delineated systems of anticipation (usually constructed around what Lacan calls a “forced vel” or disjunction, where the people are forced to choose, as in the muggers scenario, between their money or their life). Genuine politics, by contrast, is a politics not of reality, but of the real. Following Ranciere, a politics of the real is that politics that contests the very system of counting and distributing positions, that refuses the closure of reality that would claim that all is counted, accounted for, and with a proper place, and that orients its praxis with respect to the contingent appearance of the inapparent. Yet above all, a politics of the real is a politics that refuses the very system of counting, both at the level of the entities populating the social order and at the level of predelineated possibilities, refusing the system of predelineation governing appearances. A politics of the real gives birth to new possibilities, possibilities with no place or count within the reigning system of possibility.
Where political realism says “this is all that is possible and therefore we must do x”, a politics of the real contests this very system of ordering the world and invents new possibilities inimical to this gamed system of counting. Thus, for example, with Civil Rights the reality was that there was no place for African-Americans as equal citizens. The system of reality said that African-Americans are counted in this way such that they go to these schools, use these fountains, go to these restaurants, sit on these seats on the bus, etc. Any other way of participating and relating, said political realism, was impossible insofar as people were not ready for it, it would ruin re-election chances of various politicians sympathetic to equality, thereby undermining efforts of equality, etc. Thereby, we were told, only incremental steps were possible. Anything else would produce catastrophe.
Yet the civil rights movement founded itself not on political realism, but on a politics of the real. Everywhere in civil rights struggles we saw the appearing of the inapparent. We see the appearing of the impossible, of the strange spectre of that which is simultaneously counted (in a particular way by the oligarchic order) and the uncounted when Rosa Parks refuses to go to the back of the bus. We see it when people refuse to go to their assigned seats in restaurants or to go to assigned restaurants. We see it in the speeches that evoke the oligarchic order’s claim to be equal (“separate but equal”) demanding the truth of the principle of equality while denouncing the inequality its reality function practices. We see it in people being attacked by dogs and fire hoses without fighting back. In this way the inequity beneath the reality claiming to be revealed is simultaneously revealed and the excess of the real, of that which is not counted within this reality, is also revealed challenging the closure of this order. Above all, in refusing to go to the back of the bus or eat at the counter, the contingency of the so-called “natural order” (“blacks “naturally” want their places and to be among their kind just as whites do”) is disclosed, revealing the possibility of a different order. From the standpoint of political realism and incrementalism, these eruptions are understood to be both ontologically impossible (as everything has a proper place) and to be avoided at all costs. The reality-order becomes a massive regulatory mechanism, a defense formation, designed to forestall any eruption of the real within the social order. Yet in defending the position of incrementalism and political realism what one really defends is the reign of oligarchs claiming to act on behalf of the interests of everyone.
Larval Subjects . 
August 1, 2011 at 12:39 am
And, of course, here it goes without saying that politics is generally what takes place outside government. Government is always a political realism that attempts to reduce the social order to the system of the count. Politics is what contests that system of counting, revealing its anarchic and contingent nature. Politics is not what presidents, congressmen, etc., do; nor is it what takes place in the voting booth. All of these things belong to the order of reality that effaces and erases the real. Politics can, of course, address governance, but always in a polemical mode that contests its symbolico-imaginary sorting.
August 1, 2011 at 6:04 am
brilliant!
August 1, 2011 at 10:55 am
and it occurs to me that Obama’s, and many other politician’s, campaign, was founded on the exotic allure of precisely this ‘politics of the real’ that you describe so well.
August 1, 2011 at 2:05 pm
I love the lucid summary of Lacan, but the analysis that follows is problematic. First of all, after clarifying that reality is a synthesis of the symbolic and the imaginary, it proceeds to reduce reality to its symbolic determination. Second, it reduces the entirety of this symbolic determination of reality to its institutional features. As every structuralist knows, many institutional arrangements can satisfy the requirements of the symbolic order. Third, the Real cannot be mapped onto “new possibilities;” a possibility coincides with an alternative configuration of reality, not an irruption within it. Put another way, the Real discloses the artifice of reality, but to espouse it as a politics is simply to court psychosis.
Finally, all these difficulties become evident in the example of the Civil Rights movement, which was hardly a politics of the real. On the contrary, it deployed firmly established categories of the reigning reality: the discourse of liberalism embodied in the demand for equal rights. Indeed, it is only the anterior presence of this discourse that made the movement–the Civil RIGHTS movement–possible in the first place. Had the inclusion of blacks in the dominant order been “impossible,” the demand could not have found a suitable metaphor in the language of rights. Indeed, the resulting aphasia or cognate crisis of representation would have been a sure sign that an irruption of the Real was at hand.
August 1, 2011 at 2:57 pm
Michael,
The irruption of the real i. Civil rights was the emergence of black voices that had hitherto been invisible and excluded. Within the reigning symbolic-imaginary system african americans were assigned to a particular place out of which they could not step. Moreover, their voice were coded as noise. As for your remarks about metaphor, you see to treat metaphors as already there and available in the existing social order. Yet a metaphor is an invention and creation that introduces something that wasn’t there and that, above all, introduces new modes of linkage. Those inventions come to change the reality order as a whole. The Civil Rights example, I believe, is a nice example of the eruption of something that shouldn’t have been able to appear or take place within the existing system. Whether or not it was premised on a discourse of rights is largely irrelevant to the point. Politics premised on the real will unfold in a variety of ways depending on historical circumstances. The point is not that the real is a new possibility, but that it reveals the fiction that the reigning reality is the only existing system of possibilities, renderingnthe possibility of inventing new possibilities. What the irruption of the real reveals is 1) the contingency of the social order, and 2) the anarchy or lack of foundation that underlies it. As such, it gives lie to the thesis that “this is just how things are.”. That realization is a necessary condition for the invention of new possibilities of life.
August 1, 2011 at 3:33 pm
“Politics is not what presidents, congressmen, etc., do; nor is it what takes place in the voting booth. All of these things belong to the order of reality that effaces and erases the real.”
I really like this and never thought of it that way. All too often I hear the constant moaning of “people these days are so politcally apathetic, they need to get more involved” or “Most Americans don’t even know who their Senator is” etc. What you imply is that such people miss the point: political apathy IS politics, resignation is either a sign of actors sensing the futility of a government that no longer represents them or their interests OR it could mean that the actor is content with how things are functioning and is carrying out the preservation of the current political order just by going to work and having fun everyday. Neither option seems to register in the minds of the ‘get involved and vote Democrat/Republican this spring’ crowd.
August 1, 2011 at 3:45 pm
I guess that’s one way of looking at it, Drew. I had in mind environmental groups and activists, peace activists, marginalized groups fighting for recognition, those fighting global capitalism, etc. The various sites of politics, I think, take place out of government. Certainly they try to influence governments in a variety of ways, but that’s only one aspect of what I believe genuine politics to be. At any rate, parties have increasingly become a mechanism by which politics is prevented.
August 1, 2011 at 3:47 pm
To put it in striking terms (though maybe this isn’t the best example), perhaps one reason Al Gore left government was so that he could participate in politics.
August 1, 2011 at 10:10 pm
I think we need to be careful in hastily assimilating ordinary social movements to “the politics of the Real.” The metaphor of rights was indeed “already there” when the Civil Rights movement began. The selection of its name was a routine strategic choice modeled on numerous prior efforts to bring the de facto conditions of citizenship into compliance with the official and juridical rationale for it.
Moreover, the voice of the movement was not heard as noise. As a scholar of American rhetorical history, I strongly object to this mischaracterization of events. The historical record in no way suggests that this demand appeared as a monstrous impossibility. On the contrary, there was a violent controversy precisely because the demand for equal rights was articulated in the established liberal idiom, and thus seemed all too plausible. If anything, the sheer power of this idiom could not be met with the resources available within the existing order; this is why the response was violence.
For an instructive contrast, it is worth noting that during the Reconstruction, black leaders initially turned to civic republican rhetoric in the quest for equality. However, since Reconstruction policies aimed at integrating the newly freed population into the market economy rendered republicanism an untenable idiom of citizenship. Thereafter, it was this idiom that became increasingly “impossible” in the U.S.
August 1, 2011 at 10:17 pm
Michael,
Part of what a politics of the real does is reveal the shadowy inequality upon which the official public policy of equality is founded. This is exactly what the civil rights movement did. Take a look at Ranciere’s Disagreement. You’ll find plenty of analysis of how this rhetoric works and how it is an instance of the politics of the real. What you describe strikes me as a night in which all cows are black.
August 3, 2011 at 11:47 am
(Pedant alert…) Doesn’t Saussare’s train leave at 8.45, not 5 o’clock?
August 10, 2011 at 12:56 am
[…] on! The same point holds for politics. Recently I argued that politics occurs outside of the state or governments. While politics can indeed address […]
January 31, 2012 at 4:12 am
[…] When the Occupy movement emerged, seemingly out of nowhere, many in the media refused to acknowledge that it had a coherent set of demands or solutions. Over time, the reporting of the movement diverged widely from the reality of the various occupations across the country. Each encampment, itself an act of nonviolent civil disobedience, conducted a General Assembly where direct consensus-based democracy occurred. It was through this process that demands were articulated and solutions proposed. But since direct democracy is a very rare phenomenon at this time in the United States, the media and various pundits refused to recognize it as a valid method for organization and expression, let alone as a way to put forth demands and solutions. Corporate power, and the limiting of real democracy through a representative form of government, has made direct democracy seem to appear as a foreign element in the American tradition. However, as historians such as Howard Zinn have shown when discussing the various social movements of this nation, direct democracy has been one of the main methods for self-organization. And as David Graeber has demonstrated, direct democracy even preceded ancient Greece in one form or another in various tribal societies. In other words, there is a long history of this type of political organization but it has been excluded from the narrative of the West for so long, or pacified by being converted into the republicanism of the state, that it does not have the chance to speak in the language that many are used to. Current forms of power have made that impossible. Therefore, the demands made by the Occupy movement would at first seem impossible, or so out of step with the status quo that it could be targeted as being idealistic, utopian, or naïve. Divorced from the master narrative of the republican form of government and capitalist economy, the ideas of ending corporate personhood and ending corporate funding of electoral campaigns on their own seem both practical and concise. It is when it is outside of the structure of meaning and its corresponding structure of power that it can be defined as impossible. But the sudden rise of this movement is an example of how new ideas can be injected into the existing system so that the system itself transforms and realigns what it considered possible and impossible. In order for the possible to even begin, there must be a demand for the impossible. […]