Been a while, eh?
Complex Praxis for Sunday 11/29/20
Dear Friends,
The other day I got an email from one of the people who is a regular reader of this newsletter asking if I was putting the newsletter on hold. The answer is no, CP is not on hold, but my life has been crazier over the past few months than it has ever been. I’m sure I’m not the only one who is experiencing this amped up crazy time, but, be that as it may, I’ve been struggling to keep myself getting all of the things that I need to get done (i.e. the stuff my paid job depends on) completed.
One of the biggest reasons for this is that I’ve started a year-long process of applying for tenure at the university where I teach. Getting that done, along with all of the other stuff I do, has been super hard.
Anyway, enough of that. Let’s talk about some interesting things.
Transitional Bit:
One of the reasons the newsletter is not going out is that I’ve not had time to really produce things that I think are refined enough (which is different than good enough) to go out. When I got the email from the reader mentioned above, I thought, “Dude, CP is a *free* email newsletter you send out to people. Stop thinking it’s more important than it is. Just write stuff, even if it’s not super-refined, just hit send.”
Which brings me to this section for this week and probably for the next few editions of this newsletter. Today I want to focus on the Lacanian concept of the Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary —or RSI for short. I want to write about these concepts because they have been more present in my thinking a lot as of late.
(Sidenote:
I find the thing with Lacanian concepts is that you can’t just engage with them one time, even if you engage with them very seriously and very deeply. You have to keep coming back around to them, again and again, because each time you engage with them, something different happens. Over time, over repeated engagements, understanding grows.
This will not be the first time, nor the last time, I engage with RSI.
End Sidenote.)
Yesterday I sat down and wrote out how I would teach about the imaginary today if I needed to teach about it. I did not go to my bookshelf or open my archive of pdf files. I just started to write what I knew. As I wrote, I would move things around, and I would think up new ways of presenting the material, re-work what I had written, then re-re-work it. By the time I was done, I had something that I thought was pretty OK, and that is what you’ll see below.
As you read, I ask that you bear in mind that this is something I wrote for myself, so it might not make 100% sense to you (clearly, you’re not me). Nonetheless, I hope something is interesting and helpful in it for you.
Lacanian Mojo —The Imaginary (the body as it appears in a photo).
To understand the imaginary is to understand the way that a person might identify with an image, such as the image they see when they look in a mirror or when they watch a video of themselves. When a person sees this mirror/video image, they might think or say, “That’s me.” However, the image is not them, the image is not their physical body, nor their mind; it is a representation the person’s mind-body, which is not the same thing.
Another way to think of the imaginary is the way we imagine ourselves and others to be. Our imaginary-self is ourselves as we would like it to be experienced and/or perceived by the self and the other.
Imaginary Consistency
Generally speaking, I feel confident in saying that people want to be seen in a consistent way, and they also want to see others in a consistent way. When someone is constant, we can predict them better, can intuit what they think, or how they will react to something. Our ability to predict how we will react to X, or how others will react to X, is often signified by the term “understanding,” when we get a good grip on a person’s imaginary self we think we understand the, or when they get a handle on our imaginary self they think they understand us.
Likewise, when someone we know does something that does not comply with the heretofore “understood” imaginary version of the self, we get kinda irritated.
You see this all the time when someone does something that we feel contradicts something in the imaginary consistent way we think they are, and we accuse them of being inconsistent. We respond to their inconsistency by trying to bring them back into alignment with the imaginary consistent version of themselves we believe we know and understand. We do this by saying things like,
But you’ve always said, wanted, thought, loved, etc.…
No! The other day you said…
Likewise, again generally speaking, when someone accuses us of being inconsistent, we are likely to become defensive. We say things like,
No, I’ve always/never wanted, thought, loved, etc.
I know I said, that, but that’s not what I meant.
This has been a rather long-winded way of trying to claim that the imaginary is an imagined sort of consistency, a consistency we want ourselves and others to have so that we can have a good idea of how other people will (consistently) react to the ways we (consistently) behave.
Some contemporary examples of the imaginary we can point to today are:
Someone cultivating an “image” on things like social media.
The construction of identity (identity being a synonym for image) as we see it in identity politics today.
Telling someone, “I identify as X” is a way of providing them with a convent consistent image they can use as a tool to assume different things about you —“You’re an X, that probably means that Y is important to you, and A is something I should avoid speaking to you about unless I want to piss you off…”
Wrap up:
I want to close by saying that this imaginary consistency is not the way we are, nor how other people are. Sure, it is the way we would like things to be, and sometimes things are closer to an imaginary consistency than not, but nothing alive is ever truly 100% consistent.
Consistency is an image, a very appealing image, but it is not real.
Up Next: the symbolic. (Fun!)
Podcasts:
Jared and I are trying out a new format on the InForm:Podcast. It is our version of what is done on the amazing podcast Owls at Dawn.
On OaD they do the podcast is broken up into three different sections:
The Shitty Minute — Where they rant and rave about something that is making them mad.
The Main Segment — Where they talk about the main topic of the shows.
The Sticky Leave — Where they talk about something cool, useful, interesting, etc.
On InForm we are doing this:
The Psychoanalysis of Everday Life — Where we talk about something that happened in our real everyday lives that is psychoanalyticish.
The main Segment — Where we talk about the main topic of the show.
Various Sundry things — A recommendation of something.
We tried it out on this episode if you’d like to give it a listen.
Wrap:
This has been a longish edition of CP, so rath than filling in the other segments of the newsletter template I built (those sections being — Writing, Tools, & Living in the Jackpot?) I’m going to sign off.
I hope it won’t be so long before I write another one of these.
Yours, in psychoanalytic solidarity.
-N