The Real | Part one of I don't know how many
Complex Praxis for 12/20/20
Hello Friends,
The semester from hell is over! I finished my grading and submitted my grades. It’s done, 100% done. Now it is time for me to start doing two big things.
Preparing my application and dossier for tenure and promotion from assistant professor to associate professor. This will be a long and involved process, which I’ll be working on through the end of May. It is the sort of thing I don’t like doing at all, so getting it done will take serious discipline from me.
Preparing for next semester — This is something I like doing. I started to use podcast lectures in all of my classes back in March when the COVID-19 lockdown started, and that has gone really well. However, the podcast lectures were quickly thrown together and could have been much better if I would have put more time into them. A big part of the prep work for this coming semester (spring 2021) will be re-recording these lectures—more on this in the Podcasts section of the newsletter below.
One other thing. I’ve been considering moving the back end of CP from Substack to a different email newsletter provider. There are many reasons for this, the main one being the new provider can make the emails look a lot nicer—the rest of the reasons technical and not interesting.
What is holding me back is not knowing if the new provider will be able to get my emails past your spam filters and into your inbox. (Even if things do look better, it does not matter if you don’t read the pretty words.) So, I’m experimenting this week.
Along with this email, I’ve also used the new provider to send you all an essay I wrote. I’ll be tracking the open rates on that essay-email and comparing them to this email's open rates. Depending on the results, I may pull the trigger on moving over to the other provider.
(If you did not see the essay, you might want to check your spam or junk email for an email with the subject line: Complex Praxis Bonus Essay -- Psychoanalytic Sedition. You’ll see the following text at the top of that email.)
Lacanian Mojo (The real part 1 — Moments):
This week, I want to start writing about the real, but I’m 100% positive that I won’t be able to write all of the things I want to write about it. I plan to stretch my writing about the real out over the next few editions of CP.
Today you’ll be getting an introduction to the real as it appears at three different phases throughout Lacan’s teaching.
When I wrote about the imaginary and the symbolic, I did not use any references, but the real is the most confusing of the three registers. Because of how super weird the real is, I’m going to reference a few texts that I think have been helpful to me as I’ve struggled to get a sort of understanding of what the real is.
There is a good entry on the real over at the No Subject Wiki, which starts like this,
The real is one of Lacan's most difficult and at the same time most interesting concepts. The difficulty of understandingthe real is partly due to the fact that it is not a 'thing'; it is not a materialobject in the world or the humanbody or even 'reality'. For Lacan, our reality consists of symbols and the process of signification. Therefore, what we call reality is associated with the symbolicorder or 'social reality'. The real is the unknown that exists at the limit of this socio-symbolic universe and is in constant tension with it. The real is also a very paradoxical concept; it supports our social reality - the social world cannot exist without it - but it also undermines that reality. A further difficulty with understanding the real is that Lacan's conception of it changed radically throughout his career.
This brings me to the idea of tracking the changes in Lacan’s thinking/teaching through different “moments.”
Moments:
One of the reasons that the real is difficult to understand is that (as is often the case with Lacan) Lacan changes the way he thinks and teaches about it over time.
Within the Lacanian circles (at least the ones I move around in), there is a tendency to refer to the different ways Lacan teaches about a particular concept as a “moment.”
People will say things like, “In Seminar VII, at this moment, Lacan talks about jouissance as something that we get from transgression.” This is important because when you’re talking to a well-read Lacanian about something an important concept (like jouissance, object a, or the real), it’s a good idea to also say what period or the moment you’re referring to. Generally, saying something like “In the early/middle/late Lacan [concept] is described such and such way.” Referring to a particular Écrit or Seminar will also clarify the moment you’re referring to. Jacques-Alain Miller’s The Six Paradigms of Jouissance and Derek Hook’s Six Moments in Lacan are good examples of scholars thinking through the various moments in Lacan’s teaching.
However, if you don’t specify a time/moment when you’re referencing a concept, you could be asked something like, “What moment of Lacan’s teaching are you referring to?”
The moments of the real:
Some concepts get lots of moments, and others only get a few. As far as I can tell, the real has three main moments in Lacan’s teaching. (It may have more. This is just as far as I can tell.)
There is the Lacan of the 1930s and 1940s, which is mainly found in the Écrits. During this moment, the real is not very sussed out.
There is the real in Lacan’s early work, in the 1950s and possibly early 1960s.
There is the real in Lacan’s middle work, which starts with Seminar XI in 1964 and lasts until the 1970s.
Finally, there is the real in Lacan’s late work after1970, where the real became the central register in Lacan’s thinking.
Moment 1 of 4:
In the very early Lacan (what I tend to think of as Lacan’s demo-tape), the real is vaguely written about as something beyond the experience of the image and the symbolic, as what is beyond what we can see or capture with the signifier/language.
Another I think about how the real is represented during this moment in Lacan is to conceive as it of Lacan’s version of it as Kantian think-its-self, or as Hegelian absolute-knowledge. Both of these Kantian and Hegelian concepts exist, but not in a way that human beings can access.
For this reason, later Lacanians will try to signal that the existence of the real is different than the existence of the things we can grasp and comprehend. This is done by saying/writing “the real ex-ists.” I think this is the Lacanian way of saying the real ex-isits, it is out there influencing everything, but it does not exist in the same way that this newsletter exists.
Anyway, I hope this helps explain how the real is present in a vague way in the demo-tape (very early) Lacan.
Time to stop:
I thought I’d write more, but I wanted to keep my newsletter per week streak going for three weeks, and there is only so much time in a week. So we will have to leave the real for now, and move on to the other sections of CP.
Podcasts:
There is a new episode of InForm: Podcast, where Jared and I consider the question: Does psychoanalysis need to be marginalized?
As a side note, we also created a Discord server for InForm listeners to connect with one another and with us. A few people have joined, and things have been slow there. But at some point in the future Jared and I want to use it to increase our ability to interact with listeners in real-time
Writing:
As stated above in the intro: Look out for the bonus essay I sent to you, titled: Complex Praxis Bonus Essay -- Psychoanalytic Sedition.
Tools:
When the semester from hell wrapped up, one of the first things I tried to do is get my email inboxes back under control. As I write this, I’ve got about 37 emails in all of my inboxes.
I have yet to find what I’d consider to be the “perfect email” app, but I do have one that I think is pretty good: Newton Cloudmagic (YouTube demo video below).
What I like about Newton is how it changes the way I think about email, which then changes the way I process it as it comes in.
When I get an email I need to do something with it.
Delete it.
Read it and file it.
Read it and respond.
Set it aside till later.
Send it to someone else.
With Newton’s very intuitive swipe gestures I can do all this fast, and the result is that I have email get processed fast instead of letting it linger in my inbox.
As of this writing, I mainly use Newton on my phone and iPad. M desktop application is usually still the regular old Apple email application.
Again, it is not the best email application of all time. But I do find that it makes email management a lot easier.
Living in the Jackpot?
Two things for this section this week. One very ominous, and one that is super cool.
The ominous is up first. From the South China Morning Post
The Chinese military has increased the number of ballistic missile brigades by around a third in the past three years to enhance its nuclear strike capabilities amid escalating tensions with the US, a report has concluded.
Reading this brought up lots of memories of being a kid in the cold-war 1980s and seeing fallout shelter signs on particular buildings. As I write this, I think that the monster of nuclear weapons never went away. People got used to it. There is no way that is a good thing.
So, now that I've bummed you out, let us move on to the super cool thing that comes from Nikkei Asia.
TOKYO -- A trip of 500 km on one charge. A recharge from zero to full in 10 minutes. All with minimal safety concerns. The solid-state battery being introduced by Toyota promises to be a game changer not just for electric vehicles but for an entire industry.
The technology is a potential cure-all for the drawbacks facing electric vehicles that run on conventional lithium-ion batteries, including the relatively short distance traveled on a single charge as well as charging times. Toyota plans to be the first company to sell an electric vehicle equipped with a solid-state battery in the early 2020s. The world's largest automaker will unveil a prototype next year.
When I was a kid, I thought we would have some really cool (flying?) cars in 2020. The above is not the awesome car I was thinking about when I was ten. Clearly, as an adult, my standards for “super cool car” have clearly changed.
The Ghosts of My Life:
On Monday of this week, I went into a Starbucks and got some coffee and something to eat. (Starbucks is my guilty pleasure.) I did the order ahead thing you can do through the Starbucks app and went into the store to pick it up. I did this because I’ve never liked using drive-throughs.
As I grabbed my food and looked at the empty tables, I was struck by how much I missed being able to go to a place that was not my house and read or work for a little bit. It is such a small, simple pleasure that I took for granted before the times of COVID.
This week I heard from a few health-care workers I know who have already gotten their first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine. This is good, very good.
Today, I’m wondering what sort of ghost this time of COVID will become after it becomes something that happened, as opposed to something that is happening, as it is now.
Fin:
That is not all I’ve got for now, but if I want to get this to you this week, I’ve got to stop trying to add more things, stop revising what I write, and hit send.
Till next time: Make Glorious mistakes!
-N