For me the main thing that’s important is understanding that reality is not the real. Reality is a synthesis of the symbolic (how we categorize and synthesize things) and the imaginary (how they phenomenologically present themselves in lived experience). The real is what disrupts all of that, what evades categorization, what evades phenomenological description. It’s precisely what escapes, what is indigestible. It’s what makes trauma so traumatic. We just can’t articulate or digest it. Words don’t work. We were completely unprepared for it. There’s no formula or equation for it. It’s wild and undomesticated, as well as being undomesticatable. And that’s materiality. Not the formulas for what we symbolically grasp of matter, but that which disrupts any formulation.
August 23, 2022
Larval Subjects . 
August 24, 2022 at 4:19 pm
things don’t have to exceed our understandings or the like to exceed our grasps/controls and cause us suffering and alienation. We are quite bad at even safely maintaining relatively contained systems that we designed and built let alone those that overlap or weren’t manufactured…
August 25, 2022 at 9:23 am
this has never made much sense to me, if only because calling such experiences “the Real” is so arbitrary and counterintuitive. at the same time, the Real may be traumatic, but trauma is not usually Real. most often, we are traumatized *by* the Symbolic and/or the Imaginary, not by their failure or disruption. natural disasters are “material” in overwhelming ways that are difficult to symbolize, but they don’t tend to produce trauma the way war, abuse or sexual assault does. is PTSD “Real”? trauma is indelibly linked to social attachments in ways that “materiality” cannot capture. it is less “wild” than feral. whatever “the Real” is supposed to be seems to me more akin to the sublime than to the traumatic.
August 25, 2022 at 9:36 am
dmf, of course.
August 25, 2022 at 9:47 am
*Part* of what makes trauma so traumatic is that it’s something we can’t really put into words because it lacks a place in the symbolic order and was something for which we were completely unprepared. In Seminar 11 Lacan calls it the “missed encounter”. Obviously this has an air of paradox to it as something clearly happened. I think we have to think phenomenologically to understand what he’s talking about. All of our experience, Husserl says, is structured around anticipations and retentions temporally. We have a sense of how things will go. Trauma is the eruption of something for which we were completely unprepared, that doesn’t fit. This is why, for example, we might dream about it over and over again. That’s the unconscious attempting to integrate that for which there are no words into the symbolic system and is part of why talk therapy can relieve the agony of trauma.
August 25, 2022 at 12:33 pm
I would say this accounts for most of what we suffer from even if it isn’t a Romantic as the dark wilds, I’m reminded of G.Harman’s heideggerian/theological talk of objects “withdrawing” when as pragmatists like Andrew Pickering and Isabelle Stengers suggest that the case is rather simply that things exceed our grasps and we can try (as say some 2nd order cybernetics folks tried to do) to work in ways which take this into account or we can continue to largely ignore it.
August 25, 2022 at 12:59 pm
Trauma is only one form of suffering and my reference to it was a very minor point in the post you’re responding to. You’re attributing a general claim to me that I’m not making. In my work such as Democracy of Objects and Onto-Cartography I engage repeatedly in the sort of analyses of assemblages you’re talking about, proposing better assemblages that diminish suffering. I’m not Harman.
August 25, 2022 at 1:08 pm
yes i know yer not harman but invoking the authority/gravitis of the Real is as I said reminiscent for this reader. Dreams are one of the many black boxes (symptoms and all being others) we live with/through and shouldn’t be confused with what uses we make of attempts to recount them. By the way for your other commenter of course people suffer ptsd from storms and the like our cognitive-biases tend towards not-me thinking as we see with how people are feeling like the current plague doesn’t have their numbers…