Moreno
September 20, 2010, 10:05pm
1
I came at these categories of Lacan’s from reading Zizek. I could never quite get a handle on them. I found Lacan himself even less helpful. Anyone have an idea what these three terms mean in the Lacan system?
To ante, I’ll give it a shot myself. Help me triangulate.
Imaginary -
this one seems the most like common usage. IOW stuff we imagine, images. The creations of a mind. Fantasy.
Symbolic - Somehow Lacan connects this word with Law and the father. Perhaps it is…no, I can’t even make a stab. I do know that this realm is where things are known by their differences, often, it seems in opposites. But I am quite confused here.
The Real - this I think I get the best, oddly enough. This is experiences which do not refer to anything else and cannot be reduced to anything else. They simply are and often overwhelmingly so - Zizek refers to the 9/11 planes hitting the buildings as an upsurgence of the real. The real seems to be grounding, but not necessarily pleasantly.
Here’s an online summation…
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The Real. This concept marks the state of nature from which we have been forever severed by our entrance into language. Only as neo-natal children were we close to this state of nature, a state in which there is nothing but need. A baby needs and seeks to satisfy those needs with no sense for any separation between itself and the external world or the world of others. For this reason, Lacan sometimes represents this state of nature as a time of fullness or completeness that is subsequently lost through the entrance into language. The primordial animal need for copulation (for example, when animals are in heat) similarly corresponds to this state of nature. There is a need followed by a search for satisfaction. As far as humans are concerned, however, “the real is impossible,” as Lacan was fond of saying. It is impossible in so far as we cannot express it in language because the very entrance into language marks our irrevocable separation from the real. Still, the real continues to exert its influence throughout our adult lives since it is the rock against which all our fantasies and linguistic structures ultimately fail. The real for example continues to erupt whenever we are made to acknowledge the materiality of our existence, an acknowledgement that is usually perceived as traumatic (since it threatens our very “reality”), although it also drives Lacan’s sense of jouissance.
The Imaginary Order. This concept corresponds to the mirror stage (see the Lacan module on psychosexual development) and marks the movement of the subject from primal need to what Lacan terms “demand.” As the connection to the mirror stage suggests, the “imaginary” is primarily narcissistic even though it sets the stage for the fantasies of desire. (For Lacan’s understanding of desire, see the next module.) Whereas needs can be fulfilled, demands are, by definition, unsatisfiable; in other words, we are already making the movement into the sort of lack that, for Lacan, defines the human subject. Once a child begins to recognize that its body is separate from the world and its mother, it begins to feel anxiety, which is caused by a sense of something lost. The demand of the child, then, is to make the other a part of itself, as it seemed to be in the child’s now lost state of nature (the neo-natal months). The child’s demand is, therefore, impossible to realize and functions, ultimately, as a reminder of loss and lack. (The difference between “demand” and “desire,” which is the function of the symbolic order, is simply the acknowledgement of language, law, and community in the latter; the demand of the imaginary does not proceed beyond a dyadic relation between the self and the object one wants to make a part of oneself.) The mirror stage corresponds to this demand in so far as the child misrecognizes in its mirror image a stable, coherent, whole self, which, however, does not correspond to the real child (and is, therefore, impossible to realize). The image is a fantasy, one that the child sets up in order to compensate for its sense of lack or loss, what Lacan terms an “Ideal-I” or “ideal ego.” That fantasy image of oneself can be filled in by others who we may want to emulate in our adult lives (role models, et cetera), anyone that we set up as a mirror for ourselves in what is, ultimately, a narcissistic relationship. What must be remembered is that for Lacan this imaginary realm continues to exert its influence throughout the life of the adult and is not merely superceded in the child’s movement into the symbolic (despite my suggestion of a straightforward chronology in the last module). Indeed, the imaginary and the symbolic are, according to Lacan, inextricably intertwined and work in tension with the Real.
The Symbolic Order (or the “big Other”). Whereas the imaginary is all about equations and identifications, the symbolic is about language and narrative. Once a child enters into language and accepts the rules and dictates of society, it is able to deal with others. The acceptance of language’s rules is aligned with the Oedipus complex, according to Lacan. The symbolic is made possible because of your acceptance of the Name-of-the-Father, those laws and restrictions that control both your desire and the rules of communication: “It is in the name of the father that we must recognize the support of the symbolic function which, from the dawn of history, has identified his person with the figure of the law” (Écrits 67). Through recognition of the Name-of-the-Father, you are able to enter into a community of others. The symbolic, through language, is “the pact which links… subjects together in one action. The human action par excellence is originally founded on the existence of the world of the symbol, namely on laws and contracts” (Freud’s Papers 230).
Whereas the Real concerns need and the Imaginary concerns demand, the symbolic is all about desire, according to Lacan. (For more on desire, see the next module.) Once we enter into language, our desire is forever afterwards bound up with the play of language. We should keep in mind, however, that the Real and the Imaginary continue to play a part in the evolution of human desire within the symbolic order. The fact that our fantasies always fail before the Real, for example, ensures that we continue to desire; desire in the symbolic order could, in fact, be said to be our way to avoid coming into full contact with the Real, so that desire is ultimately most interested not in obtaining the object of desire but, rather, in reproducing itself. The narcissism of the Imaginary is also crucial for the establishment of desire, according to Lacan: “The primary imaginary relation provides the fundamental framework for all possible erotism. It is a condition to which the object of Eros as such must be submitted. The object relation must always submit to the narcissistic framework and be inscribed in it” (Freud’s Papers 174). For Lacan, love begins here; however, to make that love “functionally realisable” (to make it move beyond scopophilic narcissism), the subject must reinscribe that narcissistic imaginary relation into the laws and contracts of the symbolic order: “A creature needs some reference to the beyond of language, to a pact, to a commitment which constitutes him, strictly speaking, as an other, a reference included in the general or, to be more exact, universal system of interhuman symbols. No love can be functionally realisable in the human community, save by means of a specific pact, which, whatever the form it takes, always tends to become isolated off into a specific function, at one and the same time within language and outside of it” (Freud’s Papers 174). The Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic thus work together to create the tensions of our psychodynamic selves.[/size][/i]
I’m too drunk to really elucidate my own (extremely limited) understanding of Lacan’s terminology - but i would recommend Bruce Fink’s book The Lacanian Subject for your perusal. It shoud help clarify a lot of these rather obtuse concepts.